Our marketing department, AKA Carolyn, is a wealth of knowledge. I have asked her to write today’s post about her favorite topic: Marketing for the Bootstrapper!  I hope you enjoy reading her thoughts.

Hi all, my name is Carolyn and I’m the Director of Marketing here at Zimmdot.  Lauren asked me to write a guest entry for the blog … lucky you! ;-)

If you’re a bootstrapper, like Zimmdot, it likely means you don’t have a surplus of money to spend on your marketing efforts.  In an ideal world, you would have enough money to hire an entire marketing department, conduct focus groups to ensure advertising messages appeal to your target audience and spend a portion of your budget testing new or different mediums/channels, to name a few.

But without surplus budgets, those things are not likely on the discussion board.  But there are things you can do to help build your brand without a huge marketing budget:

  1. Set obtainable and reasonable goals for your website and social media
    • You want to consistently garner attention, traffic and followers, but don’t expect magic overnight.  Diligence pays off!
    • Keyword here is consistent.  Updating your status on FB randomly once a month is not going to garner attention for you.  But if you consistently update your status once a day, potential customers will know to find you if they haven’t seen anything recently.  They will expect you to continue even if their newsfeed doesn’t.  And find you they will.
  2. Run ideas by your marketer friends, ask them for their ideas and pick their brains on the industry
    • If you don’t have any friends that are marketers, make some.  Your local chamber of commerce is a great way to get plugged into networking opportunities!

In this society, we have become accustom to instant gratification in every aspect of life.  But with marketing, unless you have ridiculously large budgets, it’s just not going to happen overnight.  Hard work and diligence (you know those words our parents keep using?) are key.  So keep at it and don’t give up.  It may be slow, but you’ll get there!


Happy St. Patrick’s Day!