It’s hard to imagine a world without marketing and even harder to imagine a startup without marketing. Sound marketing is critical to the success of every organization. As to whether a startup can survive, prosper and fight it way to prominence or become a start-down because its knockdown or knockout by competition will largely depend upon the effectiveness and efficiency of it marketing strategy. Marketing strategy is a set of integrated marketing activities in pursuit of competitive advantage. A successful marketing strategy must be the one that is holistic, integrated and synergistic.
Despite the fact that you don’t have a huge marketing budget like the big guys does not prevent you to market effectively and efficiently. There’s always a way out. Don’t seat on fences and take defense. There are low cost but effective marketing strategies a startup can use to strengthen its identity, increase it reach, penetrate it market and make huge market presence.
The goal of every business marketing strategy is to capture it marketplace after identifying the market it’s going for and having committed to that market. Whatever marketing strategy you’re using must help you to promote the image of your business and help you to appeal to your target audience. The marketing strategy should be capable of helping you to arrest the emotional intelligence of your target audience for long enough to own their heart, mind and money.
I sent out to identify the most glaring low cost but effective marketing strategies for startups. I found ten of them which I called Ten Low Cost yet Effective Marketing Strategies for Startups.
- Mobile Marketing
Both marketers and businesses use mobile marketing to engage customers anywhere, anytime, during buying and relationship building process. Mobile marketing involves the use of mobile device to deliver messages, promotions and other curated content on the go to customers.
With the recent proliferation of mobiles, smartphones and tablets, mobile device penetration is high in Ghana. A recent report on the Ghanaian mobile sector by Africa’s leading e-commerce company Jumia has revealed that Ghana is one of the Africa’s largest mobile markets, with about 34.57 million subscribers and a penetration rate of 119% (https://mobile.ghanaweb.com, 15th March, 2018). “Mobile phones have impacted every aspect of life. From the time we wake up with the alarm, to breakfast, checking calories, making PowerPoint presentations for work and many other activities are now done with our mobile devices,” the report added.
Most people love their phones and rely heavily on them. On average, people check their phones 46 times a day. Thus, although TV is still a big part of people’s lives, mobile is rapidly becoming their “first screen”. For consumers, smartphone or tablet can be a handy shopping companion. You can use mobile device to provide consumers on-the-go product information, price and access instant deals. “Mobile is like having a kiosk in your hand,” explains Redbox’s chief marketer. “It’s an incredibly important part of our [marketing] strategy.”
As business, you can use mobile marketing to stimulate immediate buying, make shopping easier, and enrich the brand experience or all of these. You can also use mobile marketing to provide customers with tailor made information, incentive, and choices at the moment they are expression an interest or when they are most likely to make a buying choice.
2: Telephone Marketing (Telemarketing)
Telemarketing involves using the telephone to sell directly to consumers and business customers.
Telemarketing is one of the fastest growing lead generation tools in selling today. You can draw a program to systematically and continuously communicate with or market to customers and prospects via telephone.
With telemarketing, you can contact potential customers, and solicit orders without any personal call upon the customer’s premises. Telephone marketing allows you to be more intimate with your customers. This type of marketing provide you with great flexibility, it can take a person from total apathy about your product or service to complete readiness to purchase.
Properly designed and targeted telemarketing can provide you many benefits including purchasing convenience and increase product and service information. One of the ways you can engage in telephone marketing is to collect customer’s telephone numbers as they visit your business premise for the first time and then follow up later with individual phone call as and when you think they have a buying need. To maximize your telephone sale “get sales appointment over the phone call between 9:00AM -11:00AM and 3:00PM-5:00PM”-Janis Drew added.
To succeed with this method marketing method, you have to know which benefits turn on your prospective customers. Give prime emphases on those benefits you feel have the most impact. Be sure you have specific offer in mind. When you are calling a potential customer, try to establish a real relationship with that person first. Try to create a bound between you and that customers first; thus related as human being before you relate as salesperson. Your contact should be brief and warm; your presentation should be concise, yet loaded with reference to benefits. Your close should be clear and definite. Your purpose of making the call is to make a sale, so go for it.
3: Social Media Marketing
Today, there’re Million of shoppers around the world who are highly active in social media and are connecting with each other and with businesses through social media portals or platform. One of the key reasons for great companies’ ongoing success is their social media marketing strategy, which they have greatly expanded in recent years to take advantage of the surging digital opportunities for direct, personal interactions with customers. “Countless independent and commercial social networks have raised where people congregate to socialize and share messages, opinions, pictures, videos, and other content. And, of course, wherever consumers congregate, marketers will surely follow.”- Philip Kotler.
Social media marketing is an integrated marketing action with use of social media portals or platform for creating curated content to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media venues. “It is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals”-Wordstream. Most businesses are buddying up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube and now riding the huge social media wave. You can start using social media simple by posting some messages and promotions on your business’s Facebook page or personal Facebook page to tell the story of your business.
Managing and integrating all that social media content is challenging, therefore identify where your target audience are and how they socially interact with each other and the social networks your audience spends their time on. With your social media presence you can create creative, eye-catching images and headlines to engage a community of buyers, drive them into your store (virtually) without them ever setting their foot in your store. However, most businesses are still asking whether social media marketing is working? Social media “are not just about engaging and telling a story and connecting,” says Starbucks’s head of global digital marketing. “They can have a material impact on the business.”
We’re now in the era where customers decide what they want to read or view on the social media, therefore your content has to be rich enough and resonating with their interest. Since consumers have much control over social media content, poorly developed social media content, images, headlines or campaign can backfire. To save you from the wrath of customers or for the fear of incurring customer’s wrath Keep It Simple and Straightforward (KISS). The look and feel of your social medial post should be attractive enough making it difficult for people to scroll over it and without looking at it.
4: Point-Of-Sales Display (POSD) Marketing
Customers of nowadays doesn’t want come shopping and go like that, they want to be fully engaged. They want to see and read display funny things and laugh to help them relieve of their stress. Design creative and imaginative display and display it in the shop that will attract customers’ attention upon visiting your shop. It should well position to keep your customers taking and laughing. When shopper or customers interact more with you at the point of purchase, they tend to buy spend more money with you. So don’t allow your customers to come for shopping without noticing anything in your shop, else they wouldn’t spend their money with you.
Lack of point of sales advertising is one of the big (if not the biggest) reasons people don’t return to a business to shop again after the first purchase. Don’t let your shop look dry; advertise to your shoppers, even when they are inside the shop. Sent a communication message or signal to them at every stage of their purchase decision level, this will help you to connect with them at the emotional level that could lead customers to involve in impulses buying.
In many customer markets the consumer’s final decision to buy is often made inside, and not outside the store – B. Mensah, E. Marfo and A. Gloria. Displays and store design are therefore visual communications tools that guide a buyer toward making a purchase, they added. Inside shop stand or display is often your last chance to communication with the buyer that will drive the customer into action of buying. The big guys (big Companies) understand the importance of this method of marketing that is why they have well trained team called merchandisers. The merchandisers’ main goal is to ensure their company’s products are available, visible, well displayed in shops and display or hang (free standing floor displays and holograms) marketing material to entice consumers to buy their product.
Point-Of-Sales Display Marketing is currently untapped within most of the businesses. While your suppliers are competing for your space in the shop with their free standing floor displays and holograms, have your own displays telling shoppers about your business.
5. Word of Mouth Marketing
Imagine yourself standing in front of home car garage in desperate need of a new car. In a state of confusing caused by the vast number of different cars and models, which one will you buy? Will it be the one you have seen in a TV commercial? Or will it be the one, which all your friends are using and which they are telling you good things about?
No ad or salesperson can convince you about feature and benefits of a product as persuasively as a trusted friends, family, associates can do. This days brand building is increasingly relies heavily on word-of-mouth marking/communication recommendations spreading rapidly through network society.
Word-of-mouth marking is earning a good conversation or recommendation from your customers, trusted friends, family, and associates about you and your offering (products or services). Thus, it is personal words and recommendations of trusted friends, family, associates, about you and your products or services to influence another person’s buying behavior either positively or negatively.
Most purchasing decisions generate to a certain level risk. This is true, especially when purchasing decision which is conducted in a way, in which the product can be examined before purchase. Word-of-mouth marking becomes an answer for reduction consumer risk, as it promotes trust and credibility. Mckinsey noted that “Word-of-mouth is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions”. Word-of-mouth marking has become a tool for marketing professions and businesses. Using Word-of-mouth marking is easy, efficient and more powerful to attract and retain customers.
People as natural beings really want to talk about their experiences or encounters. If people really enjoy your products or service, they will be willing to put their life on line for you. They will become your walking advertising vehicle. As one Steinway user/customer puts it, “A pianist without a Steinway, for me, is the same as a singer without a voice.” Customer’s words are hard hitting and sharp to penetrate all veins and make impact, just like Steinway customers recommendations.
How it works? It only work when people like you and trust you and that you have a good product or service, since nobody talks about boring companies, product or service. Happy customers are your greatest advertisers, thrill them. Make people absolutely delighted and happy, make experience memorable by way of free up their time, boost their confidence, solve their problems, raise their status, improve efficiency and make their task easier. As you do this they will want to help you in return, they will want to support you and your business, and they will like their friends to enjoy your product or service too, because you made them feel smart and important.
6. Database Marketing
A marketing Database is a marketing file that contains information about your customers; thus the collection of records about customers. These records of information could include the customer’s name, address, location, phone number, date of visit, email; customer’s buying potential and past purchase activities. Every business needs to build a database of its customers to make it easy for the development of relevant product or service for the individual customer.
How to build one? A database could be build and maintained manually or the use of computer. At the beginner’s level, you can start with a manual generation where you record and keep names, date of visit, purpose of visit, phone number and other remarks. How to get it easy from customers? To get it easy in collecting the information from the respective customers they will like to know “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) because of privacy issues. They will like to know the benefits of providing you his or her personal information before her or she can give it out. One analyst warns, “When mining customer information, marketers must be careful not to cross over their privacy line.”
The startup or beginners could start with the use of an excise book or note book with rule lines to help you record daily data on it as customers visit the shop. For instance, let say you operate a barbering shop, and know for sure that on average people barber their hair every two weeks, with your database available you could use past to call and remind your customers when their next date of barbering is due or near to be due. This will make the customer feel important and proud that you appreciate their efforts and care for them. If you operate a business where you aren’t always at the store, you could train one sale force to gather and enter useful information into the customer file after each sales visit.
A computerized database may also be created and maintained by application programs written specifically for that task or by a database management system. With the computerized system businesses could even use excel template to do the simple magic. Where a business uses application programs, these companies need to hire a skilled person in data mining. Data mining is the extraction or “mining” knowledge from large amount of data. Data miner with the application of advanced statistical techniques might gather interesting trends, segments, and opportunities.
Clearly, database marketing is for everyone no matter the size and nature of business. You could have a treasure trove of marketing data, gathered from years of interactions with customers either face-to-face or from social media monitoring. It could be used to tracks consumer trends, activities, and brand-related conversations when applies high-level marketing analytics to this wealth of data to mine nuggets of customer insight.
Businesses could uses these insights to shape big data–driven marketing strategies and tactics, from developing new products to creating more focused and personalized web, mobile, and social media content. Businesses could use this knowledge to personalize digital interactions with individual customers, down to the fine details. Thus, advanced statistical analytics could help businesses target the right customer with the right message in the right medium at the right moment.
7. In-Store Product Ranges (Assortment)
A customer walking into the store is one thing and the customer buying things from the store is another to talk about. You may like to ask why so? The answer is how you arrange the products in the store. Once the customer is inside the store, he or she wants to see products well displayed or well positioned for easy identification and purchase.
This could be foundation for a transitioning of your business to a great company. How could such a dramatic fortune happen? You just have to realize that in this 21st century customers has change and now wanted a store with more varieties and choices, thus one stop shop. Customers want you to have combination of products under one roof with a lot of product lines. Customers want to buy items across several product categories in the same store fulfilling the increasing need for “one-stop-shopping” since it facilitates the consumer’s search process.
Better business has begun to give their customers more of what they want and what’s so interesting to them. As at today scholars has predicted that supercombination stores are the way of the future. For example, customers who are interested in products such as TVs, telephones, or computers would simply need to visit “Technology” section of the shop to see world of these gadgets. Similarly, there may be categories for “Home and Garden,” “Sports and Leisure,” “Clothing,” “Health and Beauty,” “Toys,” and many more.
Amazon dominants the online marketplace by creating a world-class online buying experience that helps customers to “find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” To increase share of customer, firms can offer greater variety to current customers. Or they can create programs to cross-sell and up-sell to market more products and services to existing customer
The online giant continues to broaden its merchandise assortment, creating an ideal spot for one-stop shopping
Product-wise, you need to have the distinction of having many world products launched; consumers usually face a broad array of products and services that might satisfy a given need.
Be noted for offering a wide range of products that are categorized in the store to make shopping easy for your store visitors. Michael Powell added that “one way to survive is simple to be bigger and offer a more diverse stock than others do.” In a unique merchandising set, similar goods should be stacked side by side so shoppers find awesome selection in every category.
8. In-Store Sound & Scent
Music has a significant impact on a customer mood. Music is food to the soul, and cannot be underestimated when it comes to marketing. Music lift peoples spirit high making them to feel they are in control of their life and the world. When music songs are well or carefully selected and played, shoppers will feel at home and excited especially when the person’s popular song is being played. Music could serve as purchase motivation activator that will make people buy things in which under normal conditions they wouldn’t buy.
Good music at the store doesn’t only influence the consumer’s emotions at the store but also influences the consumer’s to act. “People respond beyond the stimuli coming from the product itself, all the other objects that is present in the environment influences their decision”.-Kotler asserted. This truly shows that there’s an influence of background music in purchase decisions. Music can be said to be a major activator consciously created to have certain effect.
According to Bitner “when environment is pleasant the consumer tend to be confortable, stay more time in the store, be more available to spend more than calculated by him, and come back to the store at a later moment in time.” The big guys fine it easy to do this; they normally fuse speakers into the ceiling of their offices at the original plan of the building or from the onset. To the startups (little guys) you could achieve this in a different way such as having a small sound system (home Theater) or radio set that could play fine music to the pleasant eyes of your customers.
Scent aroma is use to set a mood. Simple cleaning the floor with a good smell or scented cleaning detergent can help you stay ahead of your competition. It can be a big win to you least expected. Some people are naturally gently and neat, so they are always on the search for businesses that are clean to buy from those businesses.
Scent stimulate consumer’s emotions and buying mood that will make consumers feel comfortable while shopping. The number of minutes a customer will spend in your shop can be influence by how scenting your shop may be. A good scenting environment could actually move customers or shopper from mindful shopping to mindless shopping by spending more money with you.
The big guys know to do this to the maximum, for instance, the former UniBank now defunct in their Bolga branch, there was a scent dispersion machine placed in the banking hall that disperses scent into the atmosphere of the entire banking hall. This kept the banking hall smelling good and fresh which I personally believed it worked for them in customer acquisition, retention, loyalty and reactivation in those days. As a little guy (startup) you can’t afford such a machine but using any highly perfumed disinfectant liquid soap or washing powder with rich fragrance can do the magic for you.
9. Store External Images and Decoration
I’m not surprise many people a buy book by it look or cover page design or by it title. That is not their fault, because that’s only available means of measure they can use at the moment they’re buying the book. Just like in the human marriage life most people married beautify not attitude, because beautify can be seen but attitude cant. All of these can be coin as the power of attraction and image.
Image is the most powerful influence in the way people perceive their immediate environment, thus it remains a crucial concept in retailing. “Store image is the overall impression of a store as perceived by consumers, tangibly and intangibly, and becomes pivotal to ascertain as it may be used as a competitive advantage by retailers to evaluate the success of their marketing efforts and establish, through similar efforts, a competitive advantage in comparable host markets overseas”-Ranelid & Ballo.
As shoppers pass by day-in-day-out they make critical observations and judge a lot about shops base on what they see on the external part of the shop. Shoppers make judgment and use it as an evaluative criterion in the decision-making process concerning retail outlet selection. This is because this external images or decoration is an indirect communication tool for communicating with the customers as who you’re.
The windows, doors, and louver blades of the shop has to be well fixed and clean. Don’t be amount those believe that is it’s not broken, it’s not fixed. Whatever needs to be fixed before broken must be done early as possible. Don’t wait for the situation to get deteriorated before its work on, your valuable customers might run to your competitor because of that. The opening doors should be properly fixed to allow free in and out movement of customers. All this is used as a two way communication too to send message from the business to its customers and obtain a feedback from the customers in the form of sales, equity and profit.
Consumer places importance on the various store images attributes and this influences consumer’s perception of a set of salient store attributes. This could mean that, the more favourable your store image might be, the more likely it is that the consumers would shop and buy at your store and verse versa. Store image may be one of the most important reasons why consumers prefer specific service providers and avoid others. One way to differentiate your store from another is to have unique store image offered to clientele. Store image is a particularly important to retailers, because it has been found to be a strong predictor of retailer choice. Apple’s retail stores are very seductive places, where “life-feels-good” Apple’s outstanding success has never been about prices; it’s always been about creating “life-feels-good” user experiences that make its products fly off the shelves despite their premium prices-Kotler & Amstrong
10. Colour Blocking or Matching
Some people are colour enthusiast and always want to bring colour into everything they do including shopping. Arranging your product in a colourful manner could just be a done deal for them. Knowing how to match or mix the colour of your product could give your shop a beautiful colourful look and attractive.
As smith & Tailo asserted “a supermarket customers scan shelves at the rate of four (4) feet per second from a distance of eight (8) feet away”. To attract customers from far away and near it is of importance for your colours to be properly mix or match to colour the shop.
Likewise, packaging designers understands the importance of this very well since quality of a product starts with design. And as Steve Jobs was being heard saying “the quality of a design is how it look or feel but about how it works. Thus, the packing must work for the business and the retailers. Any design that looks blur will not work except it look much attractive and appealing to the eyes of targeted customers.
With the products you have in the shop, you can place the colours in a manner that can product an association. For instance, blue, green and white can be association with stimulating surf. Capitalize on this by using colour blocking to attract customers attention simple by placing selective colour items close to each other to create a strong feeling and command desire to buy. Colour blocking is the first role call the customer will always do when they appear at a shop for shopping.
By:
MALI ALBERT SHIEBILA, (CA)
MALI ALBERT SHIEBILA is a marketing specialist specializes in helping businesses to make more from their marketing activities for more grow and profit.
He holds a BSc in Marketing and is a qualified member of the Institute Chartered of Accountant (Ghana) and a full member of the Institute Chartered of Accountant Ghana (ICAG) with practical marketing experience. He currently works as the Lead Marketing Manager at MarketWell Ghana Ltd (MWG) in Bolgatanga, Upper East Region.
Email: malialbertking@gmail.com/malialbert@yahoo.com
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