Grassroots marketing is the best way for your startup business to create awareness among potential customers and to establish a brand in whatever markets you’re targeting – local, regional or even national.
There’s nothing fancy about grassroots marketing techniques. All “grassroots” really means in this context is something unconventional that allows your brand to meet your customers where they live and work -- as contrasted with advertising, which depends on mass media to reach them.
“If you’re a startup, you don’t have a ton of money, so grassroots is what you have to do,” says Laura Betterly, a self-described “serial entrepreneur” who now is president of In Touch Media Group, a Clearwater, Fla., marketing concern that she founded.
Creativity and energy are what count in making grassroots marketing effective. Here are vignettes about a half-dozen grassroots techniques that different entrepreneurs have proven to work for them.
Grassroots marketing technique #1:
Attach your signs to telephone poles
When he started up his 1-800-GOTJUNK franchise in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ben Hopper was having trouble with a tried-and-true grassroots-marketing technique: signs that he plunked into lawns and street corners. In his neck of the woods, homeowners and city work crews looked at them as clutter. So Hopper innovated and began tacking his signs to telephone poles. As long as he keeps them about nine or 10 feet off the ground, no one bothers them.
Author: The Sloan Brothers
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