Starting a business on a limited budget.

Kay just started a new business marketing apron’s and chef’s hats for children. After other expenses, she has $500 to spend on a marketing campaign – she doesn’t know if she should take out an ad, hire a PR person, start a website or what. What do you recommend as the best use of her dollars?

Not all startups have the luxury of being funded by generous capitalists or wealthy relatives. When you dig for funds from your pockets, you’ll be forced to make frugal choices so you won’t go over budget. Unless, of course, you’re a multi-millionaire to begin with. For the average startup owner, here’s how you can market your new business on a shoestring budget:

Know your goals first. Kay must be crystal clear who she’s selling to and why her product is unique to that market place. After all, no matter how interesting, pretty, crafty, ingenious a product or service is, if you don’t know who you’re selling to, your marketing efforts will be futile.

Think about your target market, who they are, where they’re hiding, and how you can get to them. Is your target market within a 50 mile radius? Is it national? Are there any local groups that can help you? Also, you need to consider how much time you have for your initial marketing efforts.

Do a bit of research. Find out who your competitors are and where they advertise or promote. This will give you a few ideas on what to do.

Get an online presence of the cheap. There’s a misconception that doing this is expensive – it’s not.

Invest $150 on a cute, whimsical logo design. (I personally work with several logo designers who would be perfect for this project – and budget). Spend 10 bucks on a domain name. Create a free Wordpress blog for your website to get started and redirect the domain to the blog. Post your items there. Also, write daily posts about yourself and your product. Get some humor into it, too. For example, if you’re selling aprons or chef’s hats for kids, you can let them wear your products and take photos of them in action, as a family.

Use PayPal as your shopping cart until you sees the need to use something more robust. PayPal is great because you can accept credit cards right away. But make it clear that ordering is also allowed by credit card, not just if you have a Paypal account, because you might miss out on some sales this way. Many people, especially those who aren’t that ‘Net savvy, will think that you need to sign up for PayPal to pay for items in a PayPal shopping cart.

Use Guerrilla Marketing And Free Publicity Tactics. Instead of prioritizing where to channel your advertising dollars, try to exhaust all your free and cheap resources first. The ideas below will take more leg-work than cash:

• Contact kids cookbook authors, kid cooking franchises, day cares and activity centers via email to see if they would be interested in purchasing in bulk quantities – for a discount.
• Carry around fliers or postcards all the time. Give them out when you attend parents’ groups, when you bring your kids to daycare, etc. Speaking of which, if a daycare center, playground, or family restaurant lets you hang up a poster for free, take advantage of it. Be sure to include your website address, too.
• Write a press release (so much info on how to online). Distribute to parenting magazines and publications, work-at-home mom media outlets (many, many online), local media, as well as online (such as PR Web).
• Submit samples to various media outlets including Rachael Ray & Oprah (who both highlight people who create products) and get them into a swag bag.
• Create an online presence at target market’s forums, on Ryze, Facebook, etc.
• Go to a very popular blog, such as a cooking blog for mothers, and send the blogger a sample of your aprons or chef’s hats for her kids. Of course, you need to do a bit of research to figure out their size, etc. But sending a gift like that to a blogger from one of her regular readers will give your product a chance of being featured.
• You can also tie in with a kid’s charity, and give them a percentage of your profits. Make sure to ask if the charity can also issue a press release about this, so that more people will know about it. They’ll usually agree with you, because more profits and publicity for you will also help them.
• Consider an affiliate program for cooking/Mom related websites. Because if you have an affiliate program, other people will be marketing for you.

Invest in Quality Photos. It’s important with some of the budget to spend it on quality photos of both you and your products (with kids wearing them, of course!) Here’s why: people buy from people they trust, so they need to see you – and the products. In addition, the media need photos of the product and you to use as well. So it’s an investment that I think is worth it.