Zero Budget Marketing for Startups

I was in Edinburgh on 3rd June, teaching part of a new School for Startups seminar entitled "Entrepreneurial Marketing: Zero-budget Marketing for Startups" to a room full of eager businessfolk and students. As it turns out, there's a lot more to marketing than you can digest in one day, so we had to leave out lots of material, but we still managed 8-hours of intensive, no-nonsense lessons, rules, tips and examples.

We started by explaining what marketing isn't (it's not sales and it's not product). Then we loitered for a while on brands ("the bit that's left in your brain when the product's gone") and mused on the futility of trying to build a brand on a shoestring (ain't gonna happen), before summing up marketing in one rule: MAKE IT REMARKABLE. Why? Because startups need free marketing and the best free marketing is when people talk about your products (aka word of mouth).

Then came my cameo... There's this little medium called the Internet which has greased the wheels of WOM to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Email, social networks and Twitter have levelled the playing field between big brands (them) and nobodies (that's us), so that good ideas, can now travel faster than Swine Flu in a water slide, regardless of your marketing spend. I advised our room full of startups to publish whatever they have (ideas, news, presentations, photos, videos, articles and tweets) wherever they can - and to optimise their content for SEO.

I also explained how there's no hiding in today's one-to-one connected world. Knowledge is power and the more you share it, the more powerful you become. Entrepreneurs who fail to participate in knowledge exchange - be it through a blog, groups, networks, forums or Twitter - are missing the biggest advantage the little guys have over the big guys. We all need to heed the words of Pulp's Jarvis Cocker when he advised his coterie of 'mis-shapes' (a perfect term for entrepreneurs) to "use the one thing we've got more of / and that's our minds!"