5 most famous start-up marketing means free lunch who doesn't like it?

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Marketing is one of the most difficult problems for startups to solve. When large enterprises launch new products, they will be in the television, line top channels of the overwhelming advertising marketing, and sometimes even hire a PR company for marketing.

But for most startups, they don't have enough money. So what about startups? We can only rely on lower budget marketing, such as blogs, emails, word-of-mouth marketing, etc.

So a variety of marketing tools suitable for start-up business. The benefits of this approach are lower costs and the ability to bring more users to start-ups. Some of these methods are simpler and some are more difficult. But they all have a common trait, and that's very effective.

Here are 5 marketing tools for the most famous start-up companies.

1. The Little Bighorn

If you have difficulty contacting your target market, try to penetrate the market to measure the market's demand for your product.

Facebook is the company that makes this tool famous.

In the early days of Facebook's birth, their target market was school students. At that time, many schools already had their own social networks. So instead of promoting it directly in these schools, Facebook is promoting it in the vicinity of schools, a marketing approach that has the advantage that Facebook attracts students ' families before they can get to know Facebook.

When your friends and family are using Facebook, it's hard to say no, and it's natural to give up using the school's old social network and start using Facebook.

Because friends around you like a service, and you join the service, this principle is called "social identity." In the Internet industry, this kind of social identity is very important.

2. The Waiting List

Do not allow users to register and use your service immediately, you can put them in the waiting list, waiting for you to slowly improve the service, approve them to use the service.

Mailbox is relying on this means to obtain a large number of users. After downloading this app, you'll find yourself in a list of waiting and clearly see where you are.

This is another manifestation of social identity, and because users are intuitively seeing many others want to use the application, you will have a strong curiosity about it.

3. The Cross Post

Add a feature to your application that allows users to use your application to post information on their other social networking accounts.

Airbnb and Instagram have used this method.

Airbnb allows users to send information to craiglists. Instagram allows users to post information on Twitter and Facebook.

The benefits are obvious, and it allows users to be your advocates, introducing your services to friends on other social media networks and attracting more users. Instagram even relied on this tactic to beat Facebook's own photo-sharing function, forcing Facebook to buy it for 1 billion dollars.

4. The By the Way

Your site must be full of corporate names and logos, which is very good. But you can also go a step further, for example, in the user posted content below also add the name and logo of the enterprise.

That's what Hotmail does.

Each email is sent by the user with the words and connections below the original message: "Get your free email account right away." In an era when other emails were still charged, they relied on this method to get a large number of users.

This means once again the user becomes your propagandist. And the best part of this method is 0 cost.

5. The Back Scratch

Encourage users to introduce your services to people around you and provide them with rewards. Rewards the invited user and rewards the person who invited it.

PayPal was born in the early days, they have used such a marketing tool, to provide users with 20 of dollars in the invitation to reward. In other words, if you successfully invite a friend to use PayPal, you and your friends will be rewarded with 10 dollars each.

Before the end of the event, PayPal Total added tens of millions of users. Of course, by using this marketing tool to obtain a large number of users of the enterprise must not only PayPal, I believe you certainly have seen many other Internet companies use this tool. Perhaps they are not giving the user cash rewards directly. For example, many cloud storage enterprises have done this: if users invite a friend to use the service, they will get 1GB of free cloud storage space and so on.

Who doesn't like the free lunch?

Of course, this marketing tool has a fatal disadvantage, that is, the cost is too high. But compared with those who collect money in seconds, the cost of such marketing is relatively "pro-citizen".

This writer, Jon Yongfook, is an entrepreneurial veteran from Singapore. He once built a very popular food website in the area and eventually sold the site. Now he is running a virtual electronics Assistant software company. In addition, he also provides entrepreneurial guidance to entrepreneurs in Singapore Management University and True InCube Thailand.

(via TNW/fast carp)