Marketing tools – a bootstrap approach

To get your product known in the market place, you will need to get a basic marketing toolbox put together. Here is a short list of the bare essentials:

1. Website
Even the smallest enterprise needs a website. You have two options - do it yourself or get someone else to do it.

• There are many, many people who will be happy to build a website for you and this is somewhere where shopping around is essential. Some web designers are geared to style, others to functionality. Get a designer that shares your mindset. You should lay out your site on paper first and then ask your designer what it will cost to put together. Costs can vary wildly: when we were putting together the Psi-ense website, we had quotes ranged from £500 to £3,000 !
• Doing it yourself will save money but unless you are already proficient at Dreamweaver or similar website packages, the learning curve involved is going to eat into the time you have for building your business.

A good compromise is to have a basic site put together by a web designer and get them to include some templates. If you're going to get people to come back to your site, you’ll need to attract them with changing content such as newsletters or information about forthcoming events. If you have templates available, you’ll be able to put something reasonable together by cutting and pasting Word files and Jpegs.

2. Literature
You will need to have something to hand out to interested parties giving the basics of what your company does. This could be anything from a laser printed A4 flyer to a glossy brochure with professional artwork. It should be enough to get over the essential features of what you’re offering.

3. Business Cards
Vital! Take as many opportunities as you can to network with potential customers. A good clean, well-designed business card is probably the one artefact that most contacts will keep and file for future reference.

Extreme bootstrappers will build their own websites, dot-matrix some basic handouts and get their business cards printed "while-they-wait" at motorway service stations. Cheap, but not always cost effective! The more image conscious your industry, the more the appearance of your marketing materials is going to matter and the more you should expect to spend. The same applies if your product’s USPs are based around quality.

These are just the basics and there are many other marketing tools to bear in mind. In the next newsletter we’ll look at communicating your message - some of the methods you can use for telling customers about your product.