Marketers will always have more ideas than they have time to work on them. Personally, I have a list with hundreds of ideas that I or my team could work on. So prioritizing is super important at any stage of the company. Always work on the idea that will bring the most value with the least effort. If you have 100 ideas, just work on the top 3. And return to other ideas later.

There is no such thing as "Asian vs European approach" or "B2C vs B2B approach", but only the "H2H = Human to Human approach".
Invest in a sincere relationship with your customers and partners in order to establish mutual trust and understanding. Automatization might be helpful for improving the efficiency of certain processes, but it will never replace genuine human contact.

The most important tip for any startup is to get your product to market as fast as possible. Don't worry about bugs, bad user experience or lack of premium design. Finding product market fit is the priority and it can't be done by finetuning your product in the garage.

1. Get to really really know your audience.
2. Focus! In early stage and bootstrapping, you need to focus your target, your resources and your product.
3. Involve professionals, get mentors and advice. Many are ready to support bootstrappers!

Implement a free - AI Chatbot on the webpage. It helps in generating new leads as well as providing customer support.

In today's personal branding and selfie culture, a strong social presence is as important as a good appearance! If you want to win the game in this fast-changing environment, be prepared to build a thrilling social media presence where followers and likes play the main role! Engagement on a post is a form of oxygen; therefore, you should always aim to post content that delivers value through education or entertainment to your intended audience. Traditional marketing is dead, while social networks are the new norms! Be social, be real, and you will be able to make waves in this digital ocean that has already covered ⅔ of the world’s population.

Involve advisors and influencers for free, to get knowledge and new marketing and sales channels.

My favorite is involving marketers in customer conversations in sales and support as much as possible, especially in the onboarding phase. Let them try to answer support tickets or sales requests or shadow sales calls. Customer and product knowledge is critical, imho.

If the startup business is B2B and you need direct contacts, nothing better than just search the company and get in touch with the top management on LinkedIn.

Do not burn cash on traditional (ATL) marketing, try to find partnerships and leverage on their already established client/customer/user network. You will need the cash for testing/upgrading/deploying your product. Unless you are Uber or WeWork.

There’s no one-size-fits-all trick to marketing. At Simporter, we constantly experiment with new marketing strategies to find the ones that truly stick. Most don’t—and that is okay. Ditch the ones that don’t work quickly so you can focus on finding the ones that do work.

There’s no one-size-fits-all trick to marketing. At Simporter, we constantly experiment with new marketing strategies to find the ones that truly stick. Most don’t—and that is okay. Ditch the ones that don’t work quickly so you can focus on finding the ones that do work.

Give! Give in plenty! Find a way to communicate directly to your early adopters market. Make your clients your happy salesforce.

Many will just go with the “content is king” advice but alas this isn’t so simple anymore. Competition in Google is tough on almost any topic and ranking a site in the top 10 may take many months or even years.
So my one advice for bootstrapped startups is to try a new marketing channel and commit to it. Right now, podcasts can be a great opportunity especially for niche or b2b products. There are literally hundreds of podcast channels out there. If your founder, senior staff has top expertise this is a low-cost high return opportunity.
Another benefit is you usually also get a backlink from their site, YouTube video and so on. So the advantages add up. The catch is you need to do a lot of them to see real value.

One thing I've noticed lately is that it's getting harder and harder to bootstrap your marketing. Depending on your business model, there is one tactic companies could try: going all out on social media engagement.
Find your inner GaryVee and let him loose. If you're just starting out you literally have almost nothing to lose. Almost any niche topic has threads, groups, pages and hashtags focused on it. Find them and as the expert you should be on that subject, reply to every thread, every comment you find. Even reply with selfie videos of yourself explaining a solution specifically to that user. Give as much possible value as you can. Your goal is to get noticed among the noise.
If you do it right and consistently you'll gather followers, invites to interviews, podcasts and even leads from this.

I have grown my Amazon consultancy business from 0 clients to more than 20+ clients with $0 spent on any advertisements. How did I do it?

1. When I began, I did outreach to my ex-colleagues and friends who had an eCommerce business – it is much easier to convince someone who already knows you and trusts you.
2. I made sure that the service they receive is exceptional and brings great results. It's important because many entrepreneurs share their experience with each other, so obviously, my partners also shared their Amazon success stories. And as you can imagine, the most popular question for them was "How did you do it / are you using any partner to help you?

So in short – Find the first clients within your network. Deliver exceptional results which they want to share with others. Get free inquiries from potential clients thanks to the word-of-mouth.

Get your product listed on product hunt

We have built a tool for agile retrospectives. We got it listed on product hunt and all of a sudden received a lot of new signups. And it was not just for a few days, it had a long term effect.

1. Use Facebook groups to talk to your target group

In two completely different projects we made a great impact for free with facebook groups. The trick was that we did not just post publicity but created fun posts / videos which featured our web page just in a subtle way, so the posts wouldn’t be removed by admins. Also, we targeted local groups which are more likely to support locals.

2. Make careful use of meetup groups

If you have a startup which is of interest for meetup groups, you can use their discussion groups to make it known. But be careful, it is easily considered SPAM, as group members will get email notifications of your post. You might want to find a way that it is not considered advertising your product.

3. Reach out to local media

Local media outlets are very often likely to print your story. Don’t aim for the big ones in the very beginning, it is easier to get into local news. Tell your founder story rather than promoting your product.

1. Send a cake to your favorite newspaper reporter

With our startup we really wanted to get into one of the biggest Spanish newspapers. We had identified the right reporter writing about tech startups, we had followed him on Twitter and replied frequently on his posts and forwarded them. But still we hadn’t caught his attention. So in the end we got a cake with our logo produced and sent it to him with a nice handwritten letter. And yes, we got a friendly and funny mention in return.

2. Use highly segmented facebook groups and other communities

I think still one of the most underestimated channels for user acquisition are Facebook groups and other communities. These are highly segmented groups and don´t perceive any post (that adds value to them) as ads. Therefore it is a more natural way to address your target audience and even gather feedback and learn from potential reactions to your posts. You can also ask questions to fuel your future roadmap or test the interest for certain products.

Make sure you know your customers

To market your brand correctly, you must know who you're trying to talk to which is why 'buying personas' are a major consideration in content marketing. As your startup defines its audience, it is important to build this persona out in order to understand the demographics, career backgrounds, interests, pain points and preferred content formats of your customers.

With a buying persona in hand, your startup can build marketing messages that will resonate with them specifically. For most startups looking to drive engagement and sales, you should be attempting to answer the questions your audience is asking in a format that is engaging for them. Depending on where your company is on the startup scale, a great way to do this is interview your current customers.

And make sure you know your business...

Likewise, you must know your business as well as your customers. In order to market your business to others, you must first have a strong grasp of it yourself. What are your USPs and positioning? What distinguishes you from competitors? And, above all, why should customers choose you?

These are key questions that your customers will want answered in your content and you need to have the answers at hand. Once you can answer these questions yourself, then you'll know what to include in your content.

One of the best things I've been able to do to accelerate our signup numbers as a marketing team of one is to look at our metrics every single week. While this feels like overkill, it offers two things:
52 chances to correct the ship and do it fast since I'm looking at numbers every week versus every month.
The ability to laser-focus on things that work (and don't) as they come up. That way, I can double down on those strategies. You only have so much time and resources to accelerate your funnel through marketing efforts and throwing money at the problem isn't the best solution. Take the time to understand what's actually working and driving numbers across every stage of the funnel and focus your efforts there. After all, you don't need to be mediocre at 100 things, but great in a select few because that's what's going to drive results.

If you're in an industry with some level of search volume (most are), then you can build a "Barbell Content Marketing Strategy" to maximize direct conversions and also build your brand in the meantime. Bootstrapping is hard. You need to pay the bills, so you need revenue generating activities. So the "safe" side of the barbell is built upon high intent and low competition keywords you know you can rank for and drive business with. This is 80% of your content portfolio. The rest is experimental content - thought leadership, original research, etc. This allows for serendipitous upside, while your "safe" basket of content pays the bills and is predictable and you can model it out.

Go to Quora and find questions relevant to your niche and business. Answer those questions, position yourself as an authority and link to your site within your answers.
Do it, not once or twice, but a few dozens of times and you'll start to get trickles of traffic coming your site's way.

Won't be the numbers to brag about but the people that do come through from Quora will be super relevant to your business and very interested in what you have to offer. They are the traffic you want to see on your site.

This method is free, works well, and it's easy because brevity and succinct answers rule on Quora and you can easily publish 20 answers today in a few hours of work.

Monitoring data from different campaigns, email, social, SEO, paid search, etc is critical because every dollar counts, but time for bootstrapped startups is also limited. My advice is to create automated data notifications as much as possible and manage by exception. One can do this for free with Google Analytics and Data Studio by setting up alerts. For example, an alert can tell you if your organic search engine traffic rises quickly, which may mean a new top ranking. Or, if your cost per click rises quickly, that could mean new competitors or a change in bid strategy is needed. By setting alerts, you don't have to check the data every day but also don't have to wait to react to threats and opportunities.

I'm a major evangelist of creating crowd-sourced content. You can use a free tool like HARO or tap into social groups and Slack channels to source quotes from subject matter experts. By doing so, you'll cut down the time it takes to research and create an article, expand your post's reach by leveraging your contributors' social networks, create opportunities for backlinks, and build a network of content collaborators that you can work with in the future.

The trick is to find free SEO tools. There are many which will help you generate Google traffic to last for years. My favorites are the MozBar for unlimited keyword research and the following plugins: RankMath, Ultimate Blocks by Gutenberg, and Structured Data. These SEO tools improve User Experience which causes Google to boost your rankings in the SERPs.

The best advice I can give anyone at the ground floor of any startup is to stay the course. It's easy to withdraw into a form of leadership solipsism when owning and operating a business, thinking that any idea that comes to mind is an idea worth pursuing at the cost of existing strategy. That kind of intellectual instability is self-sabotage; I've seen nonprofits, small businesses, major corporations and startups alike all fall prey to the same pitfall of chasing after the latest this or that. There's no substitute for sound strategy and steady, prudent guidance.

This is not to say that one shouldn't change when necessary, but necessary can too often be conveniently flexed to the leader's will and whims, especially in a smaller startup. Trust the process, stay the course.

The reps you have on the front lines generate a ton of information to inform your content strategy. Whether it be competitive intelligence, buyer sentiment, new pains & challenges, etc. – your sales team has conversations on a daily basis that can help you create content that speaks to your audience. Use it! It takes the guesswork out of content creation. Plus, if you leverage your sales team to create content alongside yours, it'll be like running a team of mini-marketers. It extends the reach of your content, your audience will find it more compelling, and (best of all) it's free!

My one marketing tip for bootstrapped startups is this: talk to your audience before you do anything else! Before you start a blog, write website copy, write sales pitches, or anything else, you need to personally talk to 5+ customers. Ask why they find value in your product, but also other personal things: Where do you consume media? What's important to you outside work? Why do you love/hate your job? These will help you understand your reader.

LinkedIn automated outreach with personalised gifs and photos.

My favorite when it comes to effectiveness (but still my least favorite as it requires stepping out of comfort zone) is calling; even cold calls. As a bootstrapped startup, you are very sensitive to budgeting and ROI, while most marketing campaigns are only partially effective. My second favorite tactic is to understand, describe and follow the journey of potential brand ambassadors. Follow social media trends, and influencers that talk about the problems you are solving. React and (very important) have low expectations, as frustration is you biggest enemy.

As a business, your greatest pitch is what your clients say about you. Invest time and ask them about pain, opportunity, delight and love - what problem did you solve for them and why did they choose you?

My favourite marketing tip for bootstrapped startups is to not wait with any marketing until you think your product is ready. If you think you start doing marketing the moment your product is (almost) ready you're too late. Your marketing should start the moment you have the slightest idea to start a company. Set up a landing page and start gathering email addresses, as there is still nothing more important than having a list you can contact on your own terms and when you want. Next to that, you can use these email addresses to build (look-alike)audiences on for example Facebook to target similar types of people than the ones that have shown enough interest to leave their email. So my tip: don't wait and start building out your list, there is no better time than today.

If you're a bootstrapped startup, by definition resources are scarce, especially on the marketing front. Marketers want to hit every single channel to build audiences and generate leads, but as a one- or two-person team, that is not possible. Do research to see where your competitions have the biggest audiences and are devoting the most resources, and stick to those. Really nailing one channel will be far more effective than spreading yourself across multiple channels and getting little traction.

Crowdsource your content. Why not reach out to influencers, people of importance, bloggers etc and invite them to contribute/to be interviewed on your blog. They will share it socially, and possibly even link-back and it's a great way to build relationships with ANYBODY.

Best marketing trick is to always show real life cases/people who your service/product has helped. Word of mouth has always been a great marketing tool. And these days with social networks, word of mouth can be significantly scaled up. So my advice is to always ask your clients/customers to share their stories thus gaining the necessary initial traction and trust.