Can startups develop a zero-dollar marketing strategy?

In the last couple years, there’s been a lot of talk about zero-dollar marketing — how startups aren’t spending on marketing while still managing to keep growing.

I was a guest on the podcast InConversation with Vivek Khandelwal, founder of Datability Solutions, where we discussed how you, the business owner or marketing head, can devise a strategy, structure your processes, and align your team for zero-dollar marketing.

You can listen to the full podcast here.

Is zero-dollar marketing even a thing?

What were the marketing channels available to you a decade ago? Print media, TV, and out-of-home media. Because of the nature of these channels, real estate was limited, leading to higher prices.

The ubiquity of the internet has opened up numerous ways to reach your audience — mobile, email, social networks, other websites, and so on. You can now leverage multiple channels in creative ways to reach your audience at significantly lower costs.

This advancement in technology has lowered costs and is challenging marketers to get creative and spend as little money as possible to reach their audience. But be ready to double down on efforts and time.

Cultivate the mindset

Get experimenting. Photo credit: Myfuture.com/CC BY-ND 2.0.

If you’re convinced that a zero-dollar marketing strategy is right for your company, understand the mindset you need to develop. A zero-dollar marketing strategy is a process, not a bag of tricks.

Let’s say, a Twitter tactic of following your competitor’s followers helped one company get a million users in a month. You think that implementing the same tactic will work for you as well? In most cases, a resounding no. To be successful, you need a scientific mind to uncover what works for you.

A zero-dollar marketing strategy is a process, not a bag of tricks.

You’ll need to set up a culture of rigorous experimentation, learning from data, and being ready to fail a lot. Without a scientific process, you’ll try a lot of things without capturing your learnings to improve with time. An experimentation process will help you stay on track and optimize your learning.

To be clear, a zero-dollar marketing strategy is not about buying clicks; it requires investment — both in time and resources.

Read what Brian Balfour recommends as the first steps in building the growth mentality.

The growth funnel, team structure, and metrics

Traditionally, marketers have concerned themselves with the top of the funnel. But when you’re in a cash crunch, you want to make the most of the users you do get into the funnel. Thus, it’s imperative that you must have an air-tight funnel. To ensure an airtight funnel, you need to identify the most important metric for each step and understand which part of the funnel lies with which team.

Build your experiments

How to set up your experiments

Low-hanging fruit

Benchmarking