You're launching an Internet services startup with a tight budget. How can you effectively market it?

1. Announcement, only let 5 winners have access to the magical chocolate factory. 2. Surprise. Conceal the Golden Tickets. Creates Suspense. 3. Mystery, The factory had been closed for years. 4. Media Pick Up. Everyone wants to own a Chocolate Factory. 5. Global. Anyone is invited to win. 6. Payment. The Oompa-Loompas are being paid in cocoa beans,

But before you even start designing your website, have a good idea on what kind of design, content, user flow your potential audience is looking for or considers appealing.

Online presence is about combining 'stock presence' and 'flow presence' in a smart way. I see a lot of people trying to create content with a Linkedin post, but his is a waste of time and effort. You should work on your key contents, publish them on your website and blog, and then create smaller contents that you use on social media with multiple angles. Also, do not minimize the impact of press articles for your SEO, as their notoriety will be a booster for your own SEO. It will also help when a client finds such an article on Google search first page!

Marketing with a tight budget automatically means organic marketing. You cannot be hyper active on all SoMes so pick 2-3 where you ideally can use more or less the same sort of content. LinkedIn is a must if you´re a B2B business, and toy should also have Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. If you´re a B2C, especially a D2C brand, focus on Facebook, Instagram TikTok and YouTube. Platforms such as X, Snapchat and Pinterest should be add on channels and not mains. Community management is exceptionally important when putting out content on your SoMe:s so find 4-5 other larger content creators who you see has a lot of the followers you´like to attract to your brand, and then actively comment on these content creators posts.

Plan your online presence. A professional homepage is not all. Depending on your products our services playfull and vibrant could be your way. Use social media but have a good plan of which plattform suits your business.

The most meaningful venture I have created was born from a partnership with my main competitor at the time. Coopetition, or collaborative competition, can be a very smart way to do business, as both are trying to achieve the exact same goal. So, really, partnerships are not always about finding those who are complementary, but sometimes just direct competition! It opens and changes markets.

It´s vital for all businesses today to show that they can be trusted. This is especially important for D2C brands since the customers purchase something before they get the product (usually). I would strongly advise D2C brands to put in 5-10 customer testimonals on the website as igh up as possible. Remember, 80% of Google and from 91-97% of SoMe users will visit your website/web shop from a smart phone, and since people are lazy, you want to ensure they don´t need to scroll further down to read how happy your businesses customers are.

For new customer acquisition and inspirational marketing I would recommend platforms like meta, Pinterest and potentially TikTok. For more demand driven marketing (with usually lower cost) Google and bing are still the way to go. PMax from Google offers kind autopilot marketing which is good to start with until you have (more) in-house people looking after your marketing. At a later stage when you use a lot of different channels, it makes sense to have an attribution software to understand better the customer journey and make based on that better marketing decisions.

In my experience, cost-effective ads involve constant iteration. If it works, soon enough other people will be doing the same, and it will work much less. So you'll need to adapt. Of course, surf the waves. There are cycles and moments when your customers will be more sensitive to your products, you need to be smart about it. And when you really invest, and you know it's working, do it massively.

The ground rule for new customer acqusition is to use META, X, Pinterest and Snapchat. Even TikTok is quite efficient although there´s a minimum ad spend here. I would strongly recommend you to find a specialist agency for any of the platforms ( or Google) and get their help to build the campaigns at start. That usually isn´t too costly and this way you ensure to get the most value for your ad spend. Remember, just because you can drive a car, that doesn´t make oyu a F! or Nacar champion and just becuase you can set up basic campaigns, that doesn´t turn you into a senior campaign specialist on META, Google, TikTok or any other platform.