7 low or no-cost marketing techniques for startups without funding

Whilst many big name startups do receive funding, they're the exception. The startup I co-founded has never raised a penny in external funding, so in this post I share some of the low or no-cost marketing techniques we used when launching MyCurrencyTransfer.com and MyTravelMoney.co.uk. We completely "bootstrapped" our comparison business, but using some of the methods I describe here we’re now helping over 120,000 visitors per month find a fairer and cheaper deal on foreign exchange. Yes, it was exhausting in the early years. Yes, the pace of growth was infuriating at times. But would Stevan (my co-founder) and I have done it any other way? Absolutely not! In this article, we’ll share some of our startup ‘war stories’ and show you how you can also market your startup on a shoestring.

1. Build…

Review the quality of your audience segments with this checklist

This blog post first appeared in the Arts Marketing Association’s, Journal of Arts Marketing, and we are now sharing it with Smartinsight's readers. For more free resources, case studies, research and toolkits to promote art, culture and heritage visit culturalhive website. 

In an ideal world we would treat everyone as an individual and tailor and promote our offer accordingly. But this is impractical. Treating everyone as an homogenous mass however is ineffective - one size does not fit all. Segmentation provides us with a happy medium.

Segmentation is a fantastic way of reaching different people with different messages and can vastly improve how you cater for people. It means you can be strategic about audience growth and development of audience relationships.

Get it right and segmentation should provide true market insight that will lead to tangible results in audience development,…

Mobile traffic up to 15 per cent of global internet traffic in May 2013 – up from 10 per cent in May 2012, and six per cent in May 2011.

Value/Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: KPCB Internet Trends You may well have seen the reports from Mary Meeker, a partner at KPCB who typically releases annual surveys at the turn of the year.  In May she updated her 2013 findings, so we thought we would alert you to this latest report. KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers We see these as some of key highlights from her report: Growth in shared and created digital content, from documents to pictures, tweets and…

Ideas on encouraging pollination to create a better experience

I spent a lot of time observing the bees - mainly because I was s*** scared of being stung and yes, bees CAN smell fear.

This was my first taste of watching 20,000 visitors, with attitude, do something that totally hooked my attention. I read voraciously and absorbed everything I could find at the library.

I was amazed at how they could engineer perfect hexagons out of wax secreted from their own bodies. I read of Their Queen and her subjects, their complex dances, their calculations of distance - always taking account of wind and the movement of the sun overhead. Like an organic machine, I watched over 50 kilos of honey come from one beehive in the hot summer of 1976 from ceaseless industry and coordination.

But one thing really stood out. That call to action,…

Google introduces new customer journey mapping tool

Have you seen Google’s new customer journey benchmarking tool for reviewing The Customer Journey to Online Purchase? I thought I would feature it at the start of our round-up of our advice from May 2013 since I haven’t seen it discussed much, perhaps because it’s built into Google's Think Insights rather than Google Analytics itself. It’s a tool to help understand media campaign attribution, i.e. which marketing channels influence lead or sale. It's based on data collected from Google Analytics, but gives a slightly different visualisation from Multichannel Funnels or Social Reports. It covers data for these countries: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, U.K., US U.S. and these industries: Auto, B2B, Classified/Local, CPG, Edu/Gov, Finance, Health, Media, Retail, Tech and Travel. Here's an example from the travel sector in the UK:

…

Webcast catchup and 10 of your digital strategy questions answered

Our recent webcast with PR Smith focused on digital strategy. PR Smith is the creator of the widely used SOSTAC® Planning system voted as one of the top 3 global marketing models in the CIM Centenary Poll. We know from previous polls, that around two-thirds of companies don’t have a digital strategy. Perhaps these figures aren’t surprising since others don’t even have a marketing strategy. Just tactical campaigns. So, we thought it would be useful to look at what involved with developing a digital strategy. We started by looking at the digital strategy question again. This is what we found: Just an informal poll, but showing that many still don’t have a strategy. It prompts the question whether you need a digital strategy - my previous post gives 5 reasons why you don’t and 10…

If User Experience (UX) is a no brainer then why isn't it higher on the agenda?

There are many tools and resources available to help us ensure that the user experience is improved; whether its enhanced through  user testing, eyetracking research or third-party experience evaluation tools.

Vitamin's Talent's Infographic reminds us of the powerful impact of getting this right since:

97% of websites fail at the UX due to a poor customer experience.86% of users give up as they feel companies don't care.Developers spend 50% of their time fixing issues which could be avoided.

We also included this as an example of a full page interactive infographic.

…

Insight from Connect2013 – the marketing roadmap and exploiting data in the right way for your business

Update 29 May 2013: Presentations now available: Volker Wiewer's and Herman Wimmer from Terradata  In previous years, Dave Chaffey has spoken at the eCircle conferences, but this year was different since eCircle is now part of  Teradata . In 2012 they acquired Ecircle and Aprimo of which Ecircle’s core business is email marketing solutions and Aprimo, Market Leader in cloud base integrated marketing solutions. I attended to take a look at some of the latest approaches on ECRM/Marketing Automation/Email Marketing/Big Data and we will share some of the most useful Slideshares when they're available. In the keynote, the VP of Teradata Ecircle Volker Wiewer along with International President Herman Wimmer gave their view on…

Paid search marketing - impact on consumer purchasing?

We are highlighting this Infographic as it gives some good tips on how to reach your consumers, their buying process and the mobile devices which they prefer to use. It's from iAcquire who are looking to show the impact of search advertising on the consumer, demographic influences and use of mobile devices. Did you know that the 'likelihood of visiting the second page increases with age' and '70% of mobile searches lead to an action on a website within an hour'. Results are collated from resources including Nielsen, Experian and Pingdom.

You can read further results of the survey in their video.

…

Retention techniques to support your online marketing strategy

For any digital marketing strategy or integrated digital communications plan, having a set of objectives and clear strategy behind your plan is essential for the success of what you are looking to achieve. This blog post focuses on creating an actionable plan around retention, which by definition is maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering. Retention should be at the heart of your digital strategy in maintaining and building communication with your existing customer base. Know your audience? Before embarking on your retention strategy, understanding your audience is a key requirement to ensure the chosen retention tactics are in line with your existing customer base - so begin to build up a profile of the type of customer/s that interact with your brand. Retention is about engaging with your existing customer base, so you should already have a wealth of…