How to get your business off the ground without breaking the bank.

 

You often hear the term “spend money to make money” as entrepreneurs we all know that its a trade-off between time and money.  If you’re bootstrapping your business, then you’ll have to dedicate the time because it does take resources to get your business going.  

Here are 3 Tips to Launch Your Business on a Shoestring budget:

1) Create Local Content

The supplement space is over $60 billion a year.  When RARI Nutrition launched their high-end line of Nutraceuticals, they invested heavily in premium ingredients, GMP or FDA approved level manufacturing and packaging that is consistent with their branding.  As a result, when it came to marketing, they set aside a healthy budget. However, the overall supplement market is fierce as the cost to acquire new clients is extremely high, due the high barrier to entry in the space.  With that said, they created local content via social media to get the word out organically to acquire new clients instead of emptying their coffers in just paid marketing.  As a result, they have a low customer acquisition cost (CAC) vs. many of their competitors in the space.  By creating local content and sharing via social media is a better way to get the word out vs. paid media.

2) If you can’t beat them join them

I know that Amazon is getting a bad rap for taking over pretty much everything that is not nailed down.  That is not necessarily a bad thing.  Going back to RARI Nutrition, they have set-up an e-commerce store on their website. However, they sell through FBA on Amazon.  They have quickly become on the fastest growing brands on the site as Amazon takes care of most of the logistics and takes their cut.  This enables the nimble start-up to work on the things they do best, manufacture great products and market them to the right audience.  You’re not going to beat Amazon, but by joining them, it provides access to millions of prospective customers

3) Become a Media Source

 There are three types of media, owned, earned and paid.  Getting the word out can be very expensive, especially if you are an unknown brand.   started podcasting out of passion but is now leveraging his platform to acquire new clients for his marketing company.  He owns his media and is quickly becoming a go-to source for entrepreneurs to learn how to grow their business.  Becoming a media source is easier than you think.  It can be a simple podcast that you record with your mac or an app for in-person interviews.  You can also video blog and post onto YouTube or Daily Motion.  The key is to become a media source and own the media vs. directly paying Google for ad words or hiring an expensive Public Relations firm.  It’s a lot easier than you think, it’s not about simply creating the content, but to be an actual media source to establish yourself as the subject matter expert as well as create greater brand awareness.

In summary, you don’t need a Madison Avenue budget to get the word out, follow these 3 steps and you’ll grow organically and be more profitable in the long-run.  Once the money starts rolling in, you can then look into beefing up your marketing budget.  As long as you have software (like Cezanne HR) that keeps you on top of employee operations, the backbone of your business will be as strong as ever, allowing you to follow these steps and achieve business growth.