Bootstrap Marketing With Social Media

If you haven’t considered bootstrap marketing yet with social media, you should. Especially if your marketing budget isn’t quite what you’d like.

Why? Because with social media it can be possible to achieve your goals with limited resources; but to do so you first and foremost need to understand your market. You need to know who they are and what makes them tick. If you don’t believe me just ask a bunch of 18-19 year old Swedish students I’ve been working with.

The Back Story

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve taught a marketing and communications course this fall. One of the assignments I set them was to market their school to 9th graders in the Stockholm region.

Before they started I talked to them about:

• social media
• networking
• promotion
• creating cool content for marketing purposes
• key value propositions

and working with brand personas.

Most of all I stressed that they needed to understand their target audience. That, to my mind, is the golden rule of marketing and communications.

The proof of bootstrap marketing is in the pudding

In the last three weeks I’ve posted three videos that the students created using a pretty inexpensive video camera. Each has been posted and promoted on Twitter, Facebook and the school blog. Whilst Jontus Media has helped get the word out on these channels, the students themselves were 100 percent responsible for the content creation.

Now this content has gone head-to-head with the rest of the schools in the Stockholm region trying to interest 9th graders in their ware. Many have hired companies to produce glossy, professional promo videos showing life at the school. Gymnasiekanalen are the most well known company when it comes to school videos used for marketing to 9th graders at present. If you check out their YouTube page you’ll see that the majority of their school videos (branded with their own logo “Skolkanalen”!) get something like 350 views. A couple have a few more. Many have less.

Although these videos are also available on their own website Skolkanalen.se and Vimeo, and have no doubt attracted visitors there, there’s no getting away from the fact that when it comes to their YouTube presence, they’ve had their butts kicked by a bunch of novice marketers from Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet bootstrapping with social media.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticising Gymnasiekanalen/Skolkanalen. What they do obviously works otherwise why would so many schools have bought videos from them. Even so, I do think it’s worth celebrating how a bunch of 18-19 year olds with no marketing experience can generate interest in a school because they’re beginning to understand how online marketing works and understand their audience.

As well as getting Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet name about online, the bootstrap marketing videos the students produced do a lot to promote the Open House events that will take place in January (and April), as well as showing the strong sense of the international identity of the school. In my experience, this is one of the key selling points to get 9th graders applying.

To put this in context if just one student applies and is accepted to the school, inspired by these videos to find out more about Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet, the school will practically cover it’s marketing budget.

Now what about your business?

If this shows you anything, it should suggest how training your people to work with online marketing and communications might potentially help you do some of the work that you would otherwise outsource to an agency.

At Jontus Media we’re more than happy to handle your online communications and marketing strategy. We love creating content; however, we also believe in setting the client free after having established a firm platform from which they can continue. We’re then happy to mentor clients.

In the case of Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet, we spent last academic year developing the school blog, building page rank and SEO, starting a Facebook Page and a presence on Twitter. This year the school invested in a site redesign and training so now students are contributing to content creation, reducing the expenditure on outsourcing content.

With a much stronger understanding of the target audience than a bunch of fortysomethings, these students, cognisant of branding and brand personas and with creative flair, are generating interest in their school that they can be proud of. I’m thrilled with what they’ve achieved so far.

Sure, we’re not talking millions of kronor generated here. But the school only needs something in the region of 225 new students coming in from 9th grade. How many of the 8,000 views on YouTube and 5000 they’ve garned on Facebook in just over three weeks will consider applying?

As for you and your business, well maybe you’re a small business that only needs a few sales each month to get by. Or perhaps you’re looking to build your presence online and show people who you are and what you do.

Whilst agencies will eat up your money, you might find that you can do it yourself if you invest in a bit of training from professionals to begin with.

So look around you: have you got a team or someone in your company who with a bit of training could help you communicate better with your audience? If so, you might benefit benefit from developing them and the role they play.

When the fat lady sings

Finally, what this project has taught me (or reconfirmed, actually) is that bootstrap marketing with social media can be a valuable approach if you really understand your target audience. In other words, you don’t have to spend a fortune on marketing. If you develop your online content marketing with your target audience specifically in mind and disseminate that content across online channels like blogs, twitter, Facebook and YouTube that you’ve built up over time, great things may happen.

PS.
Diane Krose over at DKR Communications has a great article on content marketing and targeting your audience. Definitely worth checking out!