The words I never want to hear: “There’s no budget for that”

Over my long and sometimes entertaining career, I’ve had the pleasure of working on many product launches.  Some have been wildly successful. Some, not so much.

There’s one thing I found in common with all launches: Marketing funds didn’t necessarily play a part in the success of the product. I’ve seen products released without a big budget do incredibly well. I’ve seen products launched with a big budget do poorly.

Hence, there’s one statement I’ve heard over the years that personally drives me a bit batty: We don’t have the money to launch the product. 

It is utter nonsense.

Obviously, the ideal is to have a great launch budget! However, don’t get yourself tangled up on the need to have money. You actually don’t need much to market successfully these days. In fact, you didn’t need much 20 years ago, either.

What you really need for a successful launch is some smarts and, most importantly, the intention to have a successful launch.

The “smarts” part of it comes from experience, which can be learned.

As an example, many years ago, I launched a product at a startup which had nearly zero revenue. With very little in launch funds, we built an amazingly successful brand (we didn’t even have to pay our costs up-front, as we negotiated payment terms with most of our suppliers”).

I spent a big portion of my budget on a ton of surveys of potential customers.  This allowed me to get my positioning and messaging right. I spent a lot of time on this part. This allowed me to have the confidence to push hard on the rest of my marketing, because I knew what the customer wanted, and how to get the customer to buy the product. (You don’t even need to spend a lot of money doing surveys. You can do them yourselves at the local mall, or use Google surveys. Or, go to online groups where your typical customers congregate and ask them to do a survey using Surveymonkey.)

The second thing I did was heavily leverage the press to write about the product. These days, press is “dead”, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still use similar communication channels. There are still many writers out there that people read, such as blogs and sites like CNET or ZDNET.

(In order to determine the correct communication channels, one does what I call a “customer work-back”. You define the customer, and then work back where they get their information and where they purchase.  This allows you to a) determine the communication channels and b) the distribution channels. For example, if your customers are system administrators in mid-sized companies, you simply find out where they get their information from and where they typically purchase. And there’s your basic communication and channel strategy.)

The rest of the launch was pretty much block-and-tackling. This product was going into both online and retail, and there is a bit of detail around these two parts that aren’t worth getting into in this blog.

But the broader idea was that we did a lot of homework up-front, got our messaging nailed down, used free communication channels to promote it, launched the product with a lot of confidence, and the rest was history.

So here’s some quick ideas as to how you can marketing very inexpensively these days:

–  Websites are ridiculously cheap, so you don’t need to spend money on expensive designers. You can create a stunning website yourself in a day or two using great WordPress themes like Avada.  Use free graphic services like logomakr, TheNounProject, picmonkey and pixlr. Or, use inexpensive services like 99designs, guru or elance. And don’t bother using ugly stock photos. There are so many incredible free images out there, it will make your head spin. I won’t get into all the tips and tricks. This stuff is pretty straightforward given a will to get something done.

–  Mail, mail, mail. Use a good mailing service like GetResponse or Aweber to really build your fat funnel and do things like using auto-responders. Learn about this stuff. It really works. All of the big email marketing companies have tons of videos. You can also look at classic direct mail, which, believe it or not, still has a place.

There’s a funny thing about mailing; you don’t always see the results directly from the mailing, but you see it elsewhere.  The key thing is to focus constantly on quality communication out.

–  Use leverage wherever possible. The incredible thing about the internet economy is the idea of leverage — one keystroke can get your message to many, many people. QuickSprout has a useful infographic which describes the leverage strategy for low-cost marketing. It focuses on using communities; incentivizing users to share; using affiliate programs; doing blogger and youtuber outreach (as well as guest blogging); using your existing network; getting your friends to share; and getting out there in person.

–  Learn to hustle. Don’t be embarrassed by getting out there and hustling for business. Most people respect a bit of hustle. People who don’t are not the people you should care about.

I remember many years ago going to a tradeshow with a few boxes of product along with me. We were a tiny startup with zero funds. So I entered as a tradeshow attendee, found an empty table and started selling product, right there on the tradeshow floor. No, I didn’t pay for a booth. But darn it, we needed the money, so we sat there and paid for our trip, selling right there on the floor.  Then, after selling all of our product, we spent the rest of the day hustling on the tradeshow. I would also go to user groups and sell directly to user group members — an easy way to generate lots of cash. I even snuck into major industry conferences through the back-door without paying (okay, that’s a bit bad, but we really had no money), and then would hustle business at the conference. Tradeshows are a great place to hustle, especially if you’re selling to other companies (such as an OEM product). Go directly to the booth and ask for the person “in charge of …”, and if they’re not there, get their contact information.

I admit, I have a bit more hustle than most people, and I often wonder why people are too scared to get out there. But I suppose I don’t have a big problem with rejection. If you do, get over it. All businesses have a lot of rejection, but if you don’t get out there and hustle, something terrible will happen: nothing.

–  Barter. Do the $5 marketing plan.

–  Use LinkedIn and send free gifts. The most powerful business networking tool is LinkedIn. Or, use other data services to find potential target customers. Then, send the target a free gift, and ask for a meeting. At one company I work with, this “gift” strategy yielded some of their best leads. Another company I’ve worked with would send an email to a target customer, offering “to buy them lunch” (really, a $20 gift card). The exchange was to do a survey, which ultimately lead to the customer being educated on the product. $20 for a highly qualified lead? That’s not bad.

There are many other ideas. The point is not to get tied up in “we have no budget”. That’s very dangerous (and false) thinking. Some of the most successful tech companies companies today have had no marketing budget (Facebook, DropBox, AirBnB and many others). What they had was a great product or service, a lot of desire and a lot of persistence. And in the end, these three ingredients have no equal when it comes to success.