“Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do.”
Jeff Bezos
If you’re bootstrapped, early stage, or just tightening the belt in 2024, don’t worry. There are plenty of marketing tactics to win at demand generation, brand awareness, and category leadership.
Ditch expensive paid media campaigns (they don’t work anyway). For true low-cost, high-value, ROI-positive tactics, focus on these tried and true channels:
1. Content
Authentic, educational, and opinionated content about your problem space and your ultimate solution is gold. It will boost SEO, generate buzz and leads on LinkedIn, and get you speaking invites. Think you need expensive writers? Not at all. In fact, we don’t believe in outsourcing your content. Write it yourself, polish with an Upwork copyeditor, or simply use ChatGPT. It doesn’t need to be perfect. The two technical co-founders at a pre-seed startup client of Blue Seedling wrote content that drove enterprise leads via LinkedIn, Google, and Quora.
2. LinkedIn organic and the Founder Platform Launchpad
If you’re not posting on LinkedIn at least twice a week, you’re doing it wrong. In 2024, it’s a powerful, cost-effective way to boost brand awareness, generate toasty leads, and establish category dominance. And with GenAI writing tools, there’s really no excuse.
3. Conferences
They work, and like buying a car, you can get them on any budget. The shoestring version includes hanging out at the Starbucks outside the exhibit hall and hustling for meetings.
4. ABM database augmentation and email marketing
Create your target account list. Use inexpensive tools and services to create a database of leads. Consistently send them valuable, educational, non-salesy content via email and LinkedIn.
💡Our recommendation for the best type of email you can send? Go with a simple, mostly plain-text email from a real person featuring links to valuable content and commentary.
5. “Partner / influencer marketing“
At your stage, this is just a fancy term for finding a few companies or individuals with access to your audience, and creating win-win collaborations with them, like a joint webinar, event, or a content piece
6. Community hacking
In 2024, communities are a powerful and sustainable marketing tactic. Even if a full-scale community is out of reach, there are simple hacks to kickstart your buyer community, leveraging your existing marketing activities.
7. Use Blue Seedling resources
We offer literally a gazillion do-it-yourself resources for implementing all of the above: free playbooks, templates, courses, webinars. Sign up for our free, not-too-frequent, hailed as “the best content in my inbox” newsletter to stay up to date on the latest.
Final Confession: None of these ideas are rocket science. 😱 They’re designed to inspire creative thinking beyond the “$50k monthly paid media budget” mindset. More importantly, they’re here to boost your morale and set you on a path toward sustainable growth and success in 2024.
