10 Budget-Friendly Marketing Tactics for Startups

As a founder or early-stage entrepreneur, you're often the one-man army.

When starting a new venture, it's common to lack the traction, credibility, or vision to convince others to join your journey.

Moreover, most entrepreneurs start their businesses by solving a problem that inspires or bugs them, meaning they’re product people.

Consequently, most new ventures fail because they can’t stir that same passion in the market. Put simpler: Most entrepreneurs suck at promoting and selling their stuff.

That’s where I come to help. Here are 10 marketing tactics that I use to start every new business I create. They are simple, cost-effective (mostly free), and for most entrepreneurs, are activities that come naturally.

See what you think.

1. Email your professional (and personal) friends and colleagues

If you’re starting something, this is always your first move. Get out your phone and start emailing and texting people straight out of your contacts.

Tell them what you’re working on and who it helps.

I guarantee you will get at least one or two sales, providing an immediate boost to your business.

Yes, you will probably close a deal or two, which brings up an important point. Always have something to sell.

This can be a service that will eventually become a product or a service that will get you out into the field with some of your future ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles).

2. X or LinkedIn posts

As an entrepreneur, you must think, build, work, and agitate in public.

Write your earliest ideas and seeds in Apple Notes, Field Notes, or Notion, but in short order, they need to go out on X or LinkedIn.

These little morsels will grow an audience of ICPs around you, and those folks will give you instant feedback on positioning, messaging, features, copy, and full-blown product and business ideas.

3. Substack

Remember #1—email friends and colleagues. Substack or your email list is the scaled version of this strategy.

Start a newsletter and use Substack.

First, it gives you a way to begin writing directly to your audience on a regular basis, staying top of mind and delivering value to them weekly (my suggested cadence).

There are many ways to frame your newsletter—curate content, share your entrepreneurial journey by working in public, essays, or educate in the domain that your product serves. Start with one of these to give you structure and eliminate the friction of deciding who to write.

Feel free to test and evolve.

Don’t forget to promote your newsletter shamelessly. Make it a call to action on everything else you publish. You’re building an “owned” platform—an email list no one can take from you.

Why Substack? I love it for its simplicity, built-in discoverability and network effects, and its ability to turn your newsletter into a paid product.

4. Post videos

This is just a simple iteration of the X or LinkedIn post. The only difference is that video tends to develop a more personal and familiar relationship. Your video audience will begin to say things like, “I know Bill Rice,” rather than, “Yeah, he wrote this interesting piece.”

Don’t overthink this.

On the one hand, pick up that note from your spark file; on the other, grab your iPhone and start riffing to your audience.

Then, publish it to LinkedIn (which is becoming the TikTok for business folks) and YouTube (the second-largest search engine).

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are simply a subcategory of posting videos. Grab colleagues, fellow founders, other podcast hosts, or adjacent startups and invite them to a Zoom meeting (use Riverside or StreamYard if you want to be fancy) to riff on your market, ICP challenges, or solutions.

Record it and publish it on YouTube in the podcast section, then rip the audio and publish it on Buzzsprout to push it onto all of the popular podcasting platforms.

6. Webinars

Again, webinars are another subset of video publishing.

Create a few on-demand or recurring training sessions that are interesting to your ICPs. The nice thing about webinars is that you can record once or run the same webinar weekly and treat it like a one-to-many sales presentation.

There’s an art to making a webinar that generates revenue—delivering a ton of value and then pitching the easy, done-for-you solution at the end.

The beauty of this tactic is that it works as a sales and marketing tactic.

7. Team up with adjacent or complementary products

I’ve mentioned this part of several of these tactics—collaborating with adjacent or complimentary products or services is a great force multiplier.

By collaborating, you leverage their marketing and audience and gain immediate trust and credibility through their brand.

8. Create lists to compare your product with competitors

Comparison lists are one of my secret weapons.

As people get closer to buying something, they always look for comparisons to ensure they make the right decision. More specifically, they go to the web and look for the “best [product or service]” or “[your product] vs. [competitor].

These keywords and SERPs are often very easy to acquire, with little competition because most brands are scared to mention their competitors. Buyers are going to compare you to competitors, so why not influence the research with your own (authentic and honest) comparison?

9. Create playbooks that include your product or service

Creating playbooks on how to solve problems and bring solutions to your ideal customers is a great way to deliver overwhelming value to prospective customers.

Playbooks can also be an early strategy to bring an MVP (minimum viable product) to the market.

Because playbooks are designed to solve problems and deliver on business objectives, they make significant SEO assets and lead magnets.

10. Be consistent and frequent

Finally, and probably one of the most powerful tactics on this list, is creating the habits and discipline to publish content consistently and frequently.

Ideally, this would mean publishing daily and no less frequently than weekly.

Internal discussions about your product, service, messaging, and positioning are of little consequence. Unless you get that content out into the market to be tested against customer demand, you will not efficiently get the product to market fit and attract and acquire customers.

Sales and marketing don’t have to be complex early in your entrepreneurial journey.

You just have to talk into the market and allow that content to draw in an audience of potential customers.

If you like this content, please subscribe to My Executive Brief or my YouTube channel.

Book a strategy call with me if you want to focus on building your product and leave the demand generation to us.