Stop following the trend. Start implementing things which work for your business.

Before we jump on the topic I would like to make two things very clear.

Firstly, this article is just a viewpoint from my end. It's not the only way of marketing and growing your business with almost negligible marketing spend.

I have tried my best to give real time examples that we have used in our company from past 2 and half years.

Secondly, this is a big article with more than 3000 words in it. Read it at your own risk (patience level).

For me, the best parameter to judge your marketing is by looking at the sales figures. If it is going upwards your marketing strategies are working. 

I personally believe that you need to just send the right information of your product or service in the best possible way to acquire your user. After that, your product/service does the rest.

Whether the user likes it or not, do they stick for a long time, is all dependent on the core values of your services and not on the marketing gimmick. 

No discounts or offers can keep your users hooked to your brand for a long time. And why give a discount for a good product or service when your services deserve to get paid.

Many of us have the mindset of acquiring users by giving early discounts. But, is it the right way for a bootstrapped business to do so?

Let's dig deep now. I have read a lot of articles and blogs of famous marketing people speaking about growth hacking and doing marketing with very less ad spend. But, the problem is execution which nobody talks about.

Everyone who has a startup (Non-Funded) thinks Facebook ad to be the first platform to spend money and acquire users. 

They are not wrong here. Most of our users are on that particular social media. 

But, do you really think with the minimum budget that you have you will be able to be in the newsfeed of your TG for a long time only by running ads? 

There are certain things which we have done in Sportzify. These are certain pointers which we have followed from day 1 in business. 

1. Emailers with a personal touch 

I am putting this on the first point because this is my favourite. We love sending emails to our database as a friend or a guide rather than sending big pictorial images. It's just a choice nothing else. It has worked for us. 

It feels great when someone reads your mail and asks who writes the emails in your company. You guys write email content which directly connects with me. 

People get more than 100 emails per day. Almost every email is fancy.

How can your email make them click? If they clicked, how can you make them spend atleast 45sec reading that email? If they read it, how will you make sure they click on your call to action and reach your landing page? If you are able to make them land on your webpage, your email's job is done. 

Just a suggestion - Think before writing. Your customer is a human and if you allow them to have a genuine conversation with you. It will surely work. I won't talk much about the subject lines here.

There are enough articles which can give you better ideas. But one thing that we use in Sportzify is smartness and analysis on why did our email A open rate is better than email B. 

An example about the content which connects with our users:

CLICK HERE - 1 & CLICK HERE 2

Another Example - We send emails for Kids Sports Tournament registration to parents. We understand the fact that they are the ones who will register for their kids. We wanted them to read our emails. The only way we could do it was by sending a mail which looks like there is some information about their kid's report card.

Subject Line - Re: 'Vineet, Your Kids Report Card Is Here'

Hey, don't worry we never mislead them. In the content section, we provide their kid's past performance in our tournament which hooks them to our mail. 

At the end, we mention certain pointers by which they can improve. If they want to improve and showcase their skill they must register for the tourney now as only 3 days are left. 

Also, if you have noted we have used a reply sign in the subject line which makes the user think that it's a reply to one of the emails they have sent. 

I could have sent them an email saying - 'Only Last 3 days left - Register Now'. But that's direct selling. And at Sportzify, we hate direct selling over emails.  

2. Facebook Groups - Believe me, it works. 

Many people and even big marketers have told me that the way we use Facebook groups for sending information about our services is not a scalable way. 

I completely disagree with this till now. I don't know about future. I might be proved wrong but till now it has worked for us and it is one of the major channels to drive traffic and engage users. 

When we started Sportzify in July 2015, I had one thing in my mind. I will never run ads to increase like on our Facebook page. Let the growth be organic and let it be genuine users who like our work. 

We did not have the bandwidth to showcase our services through ads. This led to a hack or you can call it an experiment. 

Our users are sports enthusiasts who want to play different tournaments and fitness activities. They are regularly searching for there particular sports tournaments across various websites. 

Why not create a group around a sport and give them information only about the tournaments happening near them for the sport of their choice. 

We made 6 groups for different sports & fitness activities and within a span of 8 months, we crossed over 12,500 members including all these groups. 

Believe me, these are genuine sports enthusiast who participates in our sports & fitness activities. And we got this result without running any ads or sending mailers or SMS to join our group. 

What did we do with these groups:

• Name of the groups was very catchy and landed high in the search results. Example - Marathon Events Bangalore, Cricket Tournament Bangalore, Football Tournament Bangalore, Table Tennis Tournament Bangalore. 
• We used keywords which were searched most of the times by our users on Facebook. We also kept in mind that we had services and content related to these particular keywords. 
• The whole reason for making these groups was not just to increase traffic to our website by showcasing our information. We wanted to keep these groups very genuine. We always made sure we allowed other organisers and companies to post about their activities in the group. 

This kept the group highly genuine. People came to know that these guys are not just here to talk about their stuff. They want us to come out and play and choose the company that gives them the best experience. 

• As admins, you have to always be on your toes. We personally approve each and every post till now. We approve each and every member till now. We don't take more than 30mins to approve a post or a member's joining. This gives the new member a good feeling. 
• Keep them engaged through several polls, entertaining and relevant videos, reviews about your company's work. We have also published certain negative comments that we have received for our work in the groups. 

This gives our customers a feeling that as a brand Sportzify understands their flaw and is ready to improve on it. 

• Don't just host events/tournaments/meetup on your Facebook page. You must host these things in your groups as well. It helps them to reach the audience of the group very easily. 
• Sometimes, write genuine stuff about the group or the domain of the group to start engagement and let people express their feelings. You can make content only for certain groups that you own. We haven't done it yet. But, it might work as well. 

3. ThankYou Page for more sales

I am not sure if you will consider this as a part of your marketing. But for us, it's really important. Once a user is out of your funnel by making a transaction, can you hook them for entering again in the funnel through some other tactics?

Is it possible to hook them up with something really interesting and related to something which they have recently bought on your website? You must have seen all the big companies doing this. 

If you bought a laptop they show you a sexy laptop bag as well. 

It works for bootstrapped business as well. 

Example - A team registers for Cricket tournament for October. As soon as they drop on the thank you page there is beautiful content that explains to them why they should register for the next Cricket Tournament right now. This strategy has helped us in many ways and many times. 

4. Be honest and ask for feedback - If something went wrong how are you going to correct it. 

This one is not something which you don't know. We all know about this but very few follow it regularly. 

This is not a typical marketing strategy but this is one of the best tools to keep a reality check on what your users think about your brand and how are they going to react to your posts on social media or your emailers. 

We did not have any connection or big background in Sports. But we had one thing which people love about us. We are very genuine as a brand.

We are quick on understanding our mistake and correcting it the very next time. We promise to correct and we do it. This has helped us in retaining our customers. 

Example - In our last Cricket tournament, the umpires made some silly mistakes. We received two calls from 2 of our regular corporate teams. They did not complain and they did not even make any scene on the ground. 

They asked us to improve the quality of umpiring in the next tournament as they did not want our name to go down in front of the new corporate team that had registered in that tournament. 

It was really overwhelming to see the care our customers have for our brand. It's not just you who want to grow but your customers also want to see you reach new heights. 

I wrote a mail to all the teams personally. Here is the image. Click here.  

And it's not just me. Every single person in Sportzify would have done the same thing. That's how we try to represent our brand. 

5. Video Content (Without any professional Setup)

We were very late to this. Earlier we use to take the help of the slideshow option on Facebook or at max, we had used Animoto. 

I believe there is nobody or no video that explain your product/service better than you. 

If you are shy about shooting a video of yourself then that's a different issue. But, if you are willing to put yourself on the screen and talk about your company and the stuff which you want your users to know about then don't wait to have a big team of editors and a video team. 

You can do it with a simple DSLR camera. That's it! 

Just shoot a video, try not to edit much (it degrades the connecting factor. Let it be more human and genuine). It helps in getting a better reach than any of your normal posts on any social media. We all know the video is the way forward. Why not be on the ship right now? 

Example - Check what we did after one of our entities. No editing at all. 

• A video for talking about the brands and what next we are going to do in 2017

• Big 4 launches by Sportzify

If possible, try and capture your user interviews rather than asking for reviews over emails. It helps your customers build a genuine likeability factor for your brand. 

You don't have to shoot videos like AIB or TVF's. Just talk something which keeps your user engaged and helps them to consider your brand over others. 

6. BLOGS: Don't copy something because it's trending 

Stop writing blogs just because everyone tells that content is the king. Content only works if it is put up in the right manner and in front of the right audience. 

You don't have write listicles just because you see big brands like Scoopwhoop getting phenomenal engagement on their posts. 

Your brand might be in a different domain and your user may not want to read something like that on your page or blogs. 

Before you write you must understand what your user thinks about your brand and what exactly are they reading about your domain on the internet. Can you give them something engaging or informative to them about that subject? 

I am not asking you to stop writing listicles. But, write about what people want to hear from your brand. 

Example, we provide corporate sports & fitness services to different companies in Bangalore. We have more than 28 clients till now. 

We understood the mentality of working professionals who come and participate in a different corporate sports tournament. The behaviour pattern of both the men and the women were completely different. 

Thus, we came with an idea to write these blogs and share it with all our corporate clients. It became a huge hit in their company and people shared and tagged their colleagues on different social media. 

- 10 things you will hear from the Men during any Corporate Sports Tournament 

- 10 funny incident we have noticed among Women Corporate Sports Players. 

So, our users saw this and easily connected to the blog and the brand writing it. They would like to read it as they have been a part of something like that and they can trust the brand who has written it because they are the ones who conduct these corporate sports activities. 

7. Facebook Post Sharing 

We depend on post sharing a lot. We don't have a bandwidth of running ads for everything on social media. Most of us in Sportzify are pretty active on social media. We tend to share our posts regularly in different groups which are governed by us or someone else. If the post fits in the domain of that group then it works for me. 

This gives us an additional way to increase the reachability and engagement level of my post. This also helps us to gauge new people to our page if they find the post to be interesting. Indirectly it also helps our groups to get new content everyday from different people. 

It's just another hack which many of the great marketers will scratch of as it is not a scalable way of doing things. 

But, for me until the time it helps me making good sales, till the point my customers are engaged, it will be one of the key pointers for our marketing team.

8. Landing Pages with the right information and Call to action (Even if it's not designed well) 

I think everyone has been talking about landing pages and how it should be designed and it's importance. I just want to tell that please don't worry even if you are unable to provide a beautifully designed landing page with the call to action at the best places. 

Landing pages are important especially for certain email and ad campaigns. Even if you are able to get a landing page with required information and a CTA then also you will be able to acquire your users. 

You don't have to be a perfectionist from day 1. Just make sure it's clean and the information is put up in a proper manner. 

9. Facebook ads with zero focus on getting Likes

Haha! I love talking about this. 

We have served more than 32 brands in 2017 for their marketing and branding through our various sports & fitness activities. The first question they ask us - Why is your page likes so less? 

'Look at Page A they have 1 million likes'. 

My answer to this is - Do you need 1 million bots or you need 10,000 genuine users. Your choice. It's not difficult to get 1million likes. Anyone can do that. But can someone provide you reachability, engagement, views, conversions through genuine users?

Never ever follow the trend of likes. You may win smaller clients here and there but smart brands and smart marketers always talk about results which are way above some shitty likes. 

Make sure you understand why you are running ads and for whom. If the end result is determined then analysis of the campaign becomes easy. 

Example - We run certain videos ads only for making the users view that particular teaser of a tournament but in the second campaign we use the same video with a mindset of making the user click on the CTA and read the content on the website.

The third option for me is to use the same video to make the user directly do a transaction with me. 

Thus, the core video remains the same but as my requirements change thus the structure of my campaign changes along with it. 

10. Use custom audience on Facebook Ads 

I haven't used this option much till now. I would love to use it more judiciously. We have tried it twice and the results were pathetic. It may be because of some mistakes in our campaign. 

This has worked for many small businesses to have targeted marketing campaign with great conversion results at a decent cost. 

11. Basic SEO should be in place 

This is something which every marketer has written about. I don't want to talk much about it. There are enough articles on how to get this done. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about this as my Co-Founder (Chetan Agrawal) has full control over this. Jokes apart, make sure you have your basic SEO structure in place. 

I understand this was a very long article and if you have read this completely. Hats off to you. 

Do share your suggestions and feedback regarding our marketing style. We are trying to introduce new ways to engage our users in 2018. Your suggestions could help us in improving in the coming year. 

To all the marketers - Have a great year of marketing in 2018.