Creating an effective marketing strategy during a recession is tough. When you’re faced with budget cuts to your marketing spend or trying to figure out what you can do with no budget. You need an effective marketing strategy. The first step to this plan is to know your market.

It’s a sad fact that if you don’t market your product, service or even yourself - Then any potential customers will not find you. Even your existing customers may not keep coming back and so you are left to just watch your business float away. Mmm that’s a scary picture.

Marketing for strategies for startups

For startups and bootstraps you need to achieve more - With less - In fact the worst part about marketing for startups or in tough economic times can be reading or hearing about all those success stories.

I love success stories, but stop reading them for a minute and get on with your job.

What’s the market? Get your pitch right

Can you define your market? Can you in 30 words or less tell me how big your market is? Or where your market is?

Truth is - Even Facebook started with a single market strategy - Just college / tertiary students in the USA. Your website might have a dot com address but it’s only in 1 language so that’s a single market.

So take 5 mins - Or an hour and tell yourself about your customer.

Don’t cheat or kid yourself - you can’t be everywhere at once, you can’t expect to have a million active users tomorrow if you start from a base of zero.

Get some good numbers and insights

There are roughly 76 million people in the UK, there are about 3 million users of Foursquare world wide and London has the most registered users of Twitter. What numbers are your business case built on? And are they solid?

I like top down / bottom up business cases - start with a big number like the population of London or percentage of young people using the internet daily.  If you can do a top down business case, then investors or your finance manager will know you understand your market.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
Find our more about me.