How to build brand as a startup with no budget
There's a lot on the internet about brand building, but most of it applies to massive businesses looking to capture Share of Voice at scale. Here's how to shortcut it as a startup.
Most marketers understand the importance of building a differentiated brand. It’s what helps you reduce price sensitivity, drive lower acquisition costs and expands the available market you’re trying to capture.
But major research into the effectiveness of brand building around reach, frequency and other contributing factors don’t leave much room for smaller startups with no brand and no budget to begin with. So how can it work for you and your little startup?
Take outsized bets on things that have the potential to grab mass attention
Building brand contributes to what is called Share of Voice, which is loosely related to how much market share you have. When you’re a startup, you have no market share, which is why a lot of these concepts aren’t that helpful.
However, it is useful to understand because this is what you’re trying to shortcut. If you can’t buy for ‘reach’, that is, for as many people to see ads about your brand as possible, then you need find outsized ways to try steal Share of Voice by doing things that capture attention in a different way.
The examples below are designed to provide viral content for social media, though if they’re really, really good they’ll get picked up by traditional media outlets too.
Do strange, annoying and unexpected shit like hijacking an event or moment that people know about
Often referred to as ‘stunts’ – this kind of marketing is getting harder and harder to do but the best ideas will still grab attention.
This was a key marketing strategy for Wise and Thursday in their early days and we’ve had some success with these at Yonder too, like sponsoring The Queue at Wimbledon.
The stunt itself may not get seen by many people, but that’s okay and not really the point. Our plan was to hang around at The Queue for a few hours handing out croissants. Instead we got kicked out after about ten minutes, but we got the shot and let the internet do it’s thing. By the end of the day we’d received millions of views online and even featured in some media coverage too.
While the best ideas can generate coverage in newspapers and other media, your best bet is using these moments to fuel your content on social platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter and hoping those audiences find it funny. Design your wild ideas around what you might expect to be shared around on WhatsApp. If no one sees them then nothing happens anyway. Go big or don’t bother.
Some examples of stunts that have grabbed attention:
Fake advertising campaigns
This one will annoy the advertising heroes out there but when you’re running a small startup you have to use every tool at your disposal. Using quick mockup tools you can pretend your running ads on buses, bus stops and billboards quite easily.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mimic the full effects of mass media buying, if you want to build brand awareness through share of voice, then you have to buy the damn ads. More on that here:
The value here is, again, generating interesting content that you hope will either go viral on social platforms or get picked up by media outlets for coverage. For most of our free brand building stuff, that will always be the goal.
Here’s an example I did last year. This ad looks perfectly placed next to our competitor where the ad creative almost looks like it’s in response to the ad on the left. It’s not a real ad but it looked so real that the folk on the left complained about the ad placement. It got about 100,000 impressions and took me about half an hour to put it together.
Brands like Surreal are doing them almost every week. They may sprinkle in the odd real billboard but for the most part they’re just mockups. I think. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
Here are a couple brilliant examples of fake ads that went viral online:
Tell journalists everything
If you have something, like a new round of fundraising or a particularly interesting consumer insight, it’s possible that there’s a journalist out there interested in writing about it.
It’s a fairly complex world to navigate, but like anything, the best stories will get told.
If you’ve raised funding, then read this:
If you’ve got an interesting consumer insight:
Media outlets love to write about the way the world is changing. So if you’ve found an interesting insight while running your startup, it’s possible other people might find it interesting too.
There are tools out there you can pay for to generate lists of journos who cover certain topics and the best ways to reach out to them, but because we’re trying to do all of these things for free then just get started by going to Twitter or LinkedIn to find journalists at media outlets that you think might be interested in writing about you.
Some examples of made up insights that might be interesting are things like:
“Unlike other generations, almost 80% of Gen Z consumers prefer non-alcoholic beers.” This is interesting because it goes against the norms and one of the internet’s favourite things to do is to point our how Gen Z are so different.
“By age 30, 90% of men have had a credit card but only 25% of women have.” Interesting because it poses a question around why women are less likely to take our credit than men. The best thing is you don’t need to have the answer to the questions you’re posing. You’re just bringing the insight.
“House plants live for up to 2 years longer in apartments that are painted red.” If you’re in the horticulture then this kind of insight would blow the whole industry wide open.
And while you’re building your brand, make sure to manage it too
Painstakingly manage your online reputation
Most consumers, in the UK anyway, will do a little digging around the internet before they decide to take a punt on you. This applies to most industries though, depending on your industry you operate in, the place they go digging might be a little different.
For most, it will be Trustpilot – the home of verified consumer experiences in the UK. Those pesky little stars will have a huge impact on how people feel about your brand. Here’s a few ways to keep that rating high:
Connect Trustpilot to Slack
In just a few clicks and you’ll be able to get new reviews pinged into a channel of your choosing. We send ours into a channel called #customer-love where we post all the nice things customers say about us on the internet. Once your reviews land in Slack, you can chat about them before replying online.
If you don’t use Slack then I don’t know what to tell you.
Reply to every review, good and bad
For the good reviews, thank them for taking the time out of their busy lives to write something nice about you online. I’m sure your customers have more important things to be doing so the fact they’re writing about you means you’re doing something well. Good for you.
For the bad reviews, thank them as well. If possible, acknowledge where you fell short and apologise for the unpleasant experience they had. It’s important to manage the conversation well because though you can’t control 1-star reviews you can control how you respond to it and I promise you consumers will read both.
Sometimes fraudsters will leave reviews after we’ve closed their accounts and Trustpilot, in their infinite wisdom, won’t take them down. So we’ll say something along the lines of “Sorry that happened, but you shouldn’t have broken the rules” and at least it tells people who read those reviews that maybe their 1-star experience wasn’t all our fault.
Ask customers for reviews after moments of joy
We send an email out to every customer shortly after they’ve used their points at one of our Experience partners. We know that means they’ve just saved a truckload of money on something they really love doing so it’s a good time to ask them to leave us a review on. For other brands that mean after they’ve had their package delivered or they’ve completed an online course. Whenever you think the customer is at their happiest, that’s the best time to ask.
The messaging is important here. We lean into the fact that our Trustpilot rating is the most valuable asset for us in the fight against big nasty corporations. Everyone loves the little guy so trusting them with your brand reputation usually means they’re more likely to want to help out.
Make sure your brand tone and visual branding is as distinctive and consistent as possible
When your next big brand stunt goes viral, you’ll want to be easy to find on the internet. So having a website URL and social media handles with the same name and same logo is important. At the very least, make them similar.
You’ll also want to make sure that your stunt can be linked back to your brand through the colours you’re using and your tone of voice. If at any point it feels a bit off, you’ll be losing people along the way.
In conclusion
Incrementally trying to grow your brand is not going to work. So go big or don’t bother at all.