You’ll often hear how it takes money to make money. While it is true that having some will vastly facilitate your efforts to make more, if we’re being annoyingly nitpicky and take that literally, we could say that this would imply that money is a primeval force waiting since before the dawn of time for a suitable host to attach itself onto and through this violently parasitic bond keep itself eternally perpetuating. It would also imply that there are no other currencies out there, and we know that is not true. So, if you have sufficient quantities of creativity, talent, time, enthusiasm, energy, skills, and dedication, you can almost skip dealing with money and pay for what you need directly with some of those assets. For the sake of all bootstraps and startups that often have difficulties with finances, but frequently abound in other resources, let’s see how this applies to branding efforts.
Weighing the costs
One of the problems when dealing with units that are not as easily quantifiable as money is that you can sometimes grossly misjudge the value of certain things. Each of the tactics and approaches that we will discuss has its price, and while we only considered those that don’t require substantial financial investments (although some will act like a car on the traffic light – i.e., won’t budge until they see them some green) their costs can be just as difficult to bear.
For instance, time is relatively easy to assign a monetary value to (although this is often done almost arbitrarily), but how do you factor in the influence of stress that a particular campaign has brought into your life? How do you measure the effects of all the ripples that your latest promotional effort has created – for instance, while it may have improved the way your brand is perceived by certain demographics, it might have caused others to grow distant from you?
To be fair, and to answer my own rhetorical questions, you could assign monetary values to most of the nonfinancial resources you invested, and all the data describing the effectiveness of your approach is out there, as long as you know how to find it, but the fact is that most newly formed businesses simply don’t have the capabilities to do this and decide to take all of those other costs in stride. While it is true that the only way to make it big is to give it all you’ve got, the point I’m trying to make is that you should consider the extra costs before you even start off a campaign, and then keep reassessing them at each turn. You wouldn’t be the first to, out of pure inertia, keep feeding a campaign long after it has become unfeasible and its costs started heavily outweighing the potential benefits. Since most of the methods we’ll discuss have already been extensively talked about, we’ll just provide a brief summary of their benefits, with some quick tips and a special focus on their semi-hidden costs or alternatives.
Social networks
Rightly acknowledged as one of the more potent means for brand promotion, social network management requires a lot of work and planning, and rarely produces awe-inspiring results if the people behind the wheel are not creative, intuitive, and natural communicators. When everything is in place, social networks provide a perfect platform for the development of relatively intimate and trust-based relationships with your audience. Aside from the promotion you get, this also creates a perfect atmosphere for constructive feedback from your potential or existing customers, giving you an excellent way to gauge the changes in the way you are perceived by the public and different interest groups in particular.
Costs and considerations
We’ve already touched upon it, but it can’t be overstated: Managing your exposure on just one of the popular platforms is demanding, doing it on several will require much more time and effort than you might initially imagine.
While every type of promotion comes with the risk of your campaign backfiring and the damage being in direct proportion with the size of your following, social networks can be especially volatile, and their users can just as easily demolish your reputation as they can wrestle you from obscurity. This is also something to think about when reaching out to influencers – another common piece of advice given to businesses seeking exposure. If you are about to step into the spotlight, make sure that you are looking presentable, and that you know what it is that you’re supposed to be doing once there.
Most people talking about getting the most out of social platforms will at least mention competitions and different community initiatives. There are numerous benefits to be had from these tactics – from increased audience engagement, potential for viral growth, and perhaps a ton of interesting user-submitted content, if that’s how you formulated the contest; to having a great way to get a ton of useful info on what your audience likes and dislikes, and what kind of a relationship they want with you. However, while most will acknowledge the effort and creativity required to make something like this work, not everyone thinks of one of the potential problems with this kind of promotion – spammers.
Contests that allow visitors to easily qualify for a prize have the same effect on spammers than actual spam has on no one – it attracts them. You might think that a bunch of extra followers or likes is nothing to be frowned upon, regardless of the motivation, however, that’s not really true. People who engage your brand in this way become a relevant source of information on you, and Facebook’s algorithm uses their actions in relation to your brand as an indication of quality. For instance, your posts are initially only displayed to a smaller group of users somehow related to the brand, and, based on their reaction, Facebook decides if the post should be promoted to a much wider audience. If this test group consists dominantly of people who only had a moment of interest in engaging with your brand, your posts will be met by nothing but indifference, and rarely get bumped up to the people you actually want them to reach.
Additionally, having a bunch of imaginary likes or followers will skew any kind of tracking attempts; make your ad campaigns reach fewer people that have a genuine interest in your brand; and generally overwhelm you with white noise while you are trying to hear what people are talking about you.
Finally, while it is always important to quickly react to changes and potential problems, social networks are especially demanding when it comes to your ability to respond in real-time. This means always staying on toes and being able to act quickly but rationally.
Maintaining brand consistency
While just about everyone will agree that you need to develop your brand’s “personality” and keep your values, standards, and attitudes consistent across various incarnations of your brand, there is something to be said for a bit of flexibility. Most businesses cater to more than just one demographics, and sometimes, the success or failure of your campaign will depend on how good you are at showing your face to your audience at just the right angle.
What you have to look out for
If you have a very narrowly defined customer base, figuring out what your brand needs to look like is fairly straightforward, but catering to the demands of a multifaceted audience can be a dangerous tight-rope walk. On one hand, you have to find a perfect balance between two or more, sometimes vigorously different groups of people, but at the same time, you have to make sure that you are not contradicting yourself and being hypocritical.
While it would be great to say that, regardless of what kind of audience you want to attract – how diverse or how unified in their beliefs and expectations, the only thing you need to do is to build a brand persona or credo that you fully stand behind and that doesn’t pander to anyone, this only works for some companies, others have to make sure to hit at least some of the strings they know their customers react to.
Promotional merchandise
Handing out branded merchandise to your partners, loyal customers, or people you are trying to familiarize with your business has long been an effective marketing strategy. Some of its numerous benefits include the ability to target your efforts with great precision – a car manufacturer giving out branded key chains at car shows; lasting and recurring effects – a product that someone keeps using will constantly be working for your brand, extending its influence to anyone in the vicinity of the patient zero; it’s a relatively cheap and easy way to make a nice gesture and show appreciation; and finally, unless your choice of products that will bear the company’s logo is so misguided as to be perceived as offensive, there are practically no risks, apart from failing to make the (relatively low) investment work for you.
What people tend to forget
Most of the companies that constantly deal with shipping of various products or really any kind of organization of transport won’t have this issue, but a surprising number of ones that don’t deal in any kind of tangible commodities will stumble right in. Basically, people forget about dealing with the logistics of the matter – they will order items without giving thought to where they’ll store them or how they’re going to get them to the intended audience. The logistics of such a project becomes infinitely more complex if you only pay attention to it once the items are already in your possession. So, despite all the expert advice out there, and the simplicity of the idea itself, mistakes are still being made due to the simple lack of timely planning.
Corporate partnerships
One of the ways to reach people you otherwise couldn’t is to enter into collaboration with another business. The trick is finding a partner that you share common traits with and that targets roughly the same demographics that you do, but that you won’t be competing with for the attention of your shared audience. This kind of partnership can result in huge benefits, as long as the interests of the participating companies don’t overlap too much.
The risks
Even if your partnership is perfectly compatible and you don’t have to worry about client poaching, there is still a price to pay, and that is your independence. Tying yourself to another brand means that you don’t only share in the good, but that you also sometimes suffer together. Depending on the exact nature of your relationship, mistakes or misfortunes of your partner will influence you to a greater or lesser extent, which is a terrible thing to have hanging over your head. While you can’t be held accountable for everything or indeed, anything, they decide to do, their actions will affect you regardless of your guilt in the matter. So you will not only have to compromise every once in a while, for the good of the partnership; you will also be giving someone else the ability to make decisions that will reflect on your brand, and this can be a terrible thing if you haven’t chosen your partner wisely.
Parting words
We all know that nothing is really free, but the enthusiasm you need to even think about starting your business can sometimes make people a tad overoptimistic. While the listed ways to cheaply promote your brand really can work amazingly well, people sometimes fail to realize that these tactics can require much more effort, strategizing, and suffering than is apparent from just looking at the results. If you fail to consider them from every possible aspect before diving in, they can end up costing you quite a bit in the end, even with the low initial investment.