5 Ideas to Help You Bootstrap Your Marketing

By Lea Hensel and Cally Reed, UNI Business and Community Services

For many entrepreneurs and business owners, marketing is not in your primary wheelhouse. You’re busy running the business, managing people, paying bills, balancing accounts, etc. And so it often means that marketing becomes an afterthought or is done hastily and in a manner that may not be effective long-term. Which actually may lead to losing time in the long run. So we’ve put together five ideas that can help you bootstrap your marketing for long-term benefits, saving you time and hopefully money, maybe even generating some money.

Write Useful Content

When you sit down to write a blog or your website content, it’s important to write good, useful content. What is “good, useful content?” It is highly relevant to your ideal client, solves that client’s real problems, and answers their burning questions about your industry. Especially when it comes to blogs and social media content, you don’t need to go into detail about your services or brag about the latest achievements, you just need to solve problems and answer the questions prospective clients would be asking. In the end, good, useful content guides your readers to take one specific targeted action.

Photography & Videography

According to Pearson, 65% of people are visual learners. That means that videos and photos have substantial sway in the way of marketing for your business. Teach your audience what they should know about your company and products in their native language, the language of image. Capitalize on using this method of educating your clients by repurposing your best blogs into videos on YouTube, or let your clients take a peek behind the scenes of an exciting event you host by sharing photos and videos on Facebook Live or Instagram Stories.

Batch Social Media

For most entrepreneurs and business owners, social media can become an endless cycle. There is so much insight out there in terms of how often to post, what kind of content to post, how much should be your own internal content versus external content, and the list goes on and on. One key way to simplify it all so you can focus on growing and building your business – batch schedule it. Dedicate a chunk of time each week or each month and just get all of your posts scheduled ahead of time. Then your networks basically run on autopilot and you just need to check in to comment, like, follow, etc.

Share Your Process

It has been said that you don’t have a business until you have a process, and you don’t have a process unless it is written down. When you have written your process down, why not share your expertise in your field. When you share your marketing process, you start building rapport and start to be seen as an expert in your field with your audience and new entrepreneurs alike.

Create Long Form Digital Content

Hear me out. Yes, creating long form content is going to take more work and time…in the beginning. But when done right, you can create long form content that can be used continually without going out of date. Things like ebooks, basic training courses, guides, and webinars. This is really two-fold in what kind of outcomes it can create for you and your business. First of all, this sets you up as an expert in your area of focus, and especially if it’s technical in any nature, it becomes an easy way for you to get information to prospective and current clients without having do something one-on-one or on a continual basis. Second of all, it can become a way for you to build a mailing list. By all means, offer this content for free in terms of price, but don’t give it away. Instead of having your e-book be a download from your website, create a landing page or embed a form on your website for people to sign up to receive the content. Many email marketing tools offer this type of automation now making it easy to have it running in the background of your other business operations.

Use these five ideas to help you to invest your time better, save money, and meet new and returning customers with relevant information. Even though you may not feel like you have much time to spend on marketing your business today, it will be worthwhile to invest in marketing messages that will last. Do you have a marketing concept to that has been worth it to you? Why not tell us about it in the comments.