Startups and copious amounts of cash usually don’t coincide; however, that shouldn’t delay your company’s ability to grow as effectively as possible.
If you’re struggling with limited resources to build your new brand, here are low-cost solutions to improve your business’s cost-efficiency.
Focus on the consumer
Nurturing a personal relationship with the people who’ve invested in your product is imperative towards business growth. When you dehumanize your brand, like with a robotic customer service automation system, it can leave consumers with a bad taste in their mouth. Investing in “people” is not only cheap, but it’s also easy to initiate. Establish a presence on social media and interact with your consumer-peers. Invest in capable employees who understand the value of customer service.
Ultimately, when you involve authenticity over corporate-jargon, your business will have a better chance to succeed.
Guerilla marketing
Guerilla marketing leverages “elbow grease” over budget; in other words, your creativity becomes your expense—utilizing the tangible, public environment as your canvas. There are tons of ways to develop a successful guerrilla marketing campaign; for example, you can design your own custom stickers and plaster them on all around urban décor, which can familiarize your brand in front of an infinite audience.
Leverage methodical-thinking
When your team is small, you want to optimize your employee’s efforts to the best of their abilities. It can be as simple as creating a daily checklist tailored to each employee’s specific duties during that day. When you have a startup business, time is of the essence, so you’ll want to make sure that every second counts.
Deploy upfront costs
In the early years of your business, you need tangible growth in order to keep your business afloat. Having your customer pay upfront for a product or service provides you with the quantity of economics needed to continue to fuel your business.
Open up a line of credit
Commonly with startups, entrepreneurs experience the ups and downs of the business cycle to extreme measured. As a fresh-faced business, tribulations, overhead costs, and product recalls often need to be made and handled promptly. With this in mind, opening up a line of credit will help to ensure that your business keeps its balance and helps to prevent disaster to strike.
Take advantage of when banks are lending, especially right now. So, establish a fruitful relationship with your bank and provide your business with the insurance it needs to get it off the ground and running.
Take advantage of 1099 subcontractors during the early stages of business
Leveraging 1099 subcontractors will cost you more in the short term; however, will likely increase your ROIs faster versus not using them in the first place. During the early stages of your business, fixing “specifics” often need to be taken care of right away. Once completed, you can invest in more employees who are equipped to handle the long-term needs of your business.
Great content is an imperative tool
Newspapers and magazines may go out of style, but words will never. Great content is essential to your startup company’s success in any form it’s published. Whether it’s a press release, social media post, packaging content, blog articles, etc. Establishing your company’s “story” is one of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal to streamline success.
With an infinite number of channels to spread your business’s name, poor-quality content just about guarantees your startup’s boat to sink before it even sets sail. Invest in writers who are experienced in creating innovative forms of marketing content, which look through the lens of the consumer, and impacts decisions.
Live in the moment
When you think too long term of your business, you’re potentially putting your startup in harms way for nonexistence. Sure, long-term strategies are not necessary a bad to think about, but time is not in your favor while running a startup company. You need to focus on the “now” instead of the “tomorrow.”
Ask yourself:
What costs are most imperative presently? Who needs to be hired in order to fix a current problem? When should you deploy a marketing strategy? How should it be deployed?
These are the things that should be focused on first. Once you’ve reached a more stagnate business flow—long-term strategies should then be conveyed.
