How to Get Free PR & Marketing for Your Early Stage Startup
So you don’t want to spend those marketing dollars, eh? 💸
Here I lay out a few tactics and ideas to create authentic awareness for a startup that lacks a marketing budget. As someone who came from an open source community background at a startup and didn’t have the luxury of a massive marketing budget, I learned how to do grass-roots marketing, write speaker proposals for my team to speak at tech conferences, and find interesting ways to get people interested in our story. Whether or not these readers are big money decision makers, the aim was to get people to know and hear about us, and eventually build cool shit with our open source.
Find speaking opportunities at meetups, conferences, or any place you can speak to an audience.
Most conferences have a CFP: call for speakers. If you can’t find it online, find the general email alias and ask if they are taking any submissions. Follow the deadlines closely, as the CFP usually comes out 6 months — 1 year out in advance.
Be warned: you should avoid including your company name or product solution within the proposal itself; it’s fine to add it in the bio where they ask for it. But if your proposal stenches of a sales pitch, they’ll want you to pay for it. Readers will put you into the marketing pile, where they’ll direct you to the partnerships manager to pay to speak instead because your proposal is too product-focused.
Think of valuable use cases or lessons you can share with the audience. What would you teach them? What stories can you share? Follow the CFP closely and see how you can best address what they’re looking for.
You want to make your talk educational and interesting. Meetup groups are such a great way to start. I used to message hundreds of meetup organizers within the data analytics space to see if they’d be interested in having our team speak at their event on a niche topic.
At the end of every talk, you should include a slide with your direct contact info, and shoot out 3 to 4 swag items to the audience who answers a question. We used to give away socks with charts and pie graphs on it — people loved it. Also, most events will help record or document these talks — make sure you collect them, add it to your social channels, and add it to your portfolio so you can use it for future CFP applications.
In total, I’ve secured over 100+ free speaking opportunities for my previous team just by doing this:
- crafting a story with hard learnings and takeaways
- using an example or use case to show what problem is at large and how it’s being solved
- think of it as a TED talk, not a sales pitch
Craft the right story with authenticity.
Founders, be real. I think when founders are real and authentic, content readers respect that and genuinely just want to follow along to learn more about what they’re creating or doing. As you build out your company brand, I do think it’s important to also build out your own personal branding as well. Not saying you need to post on Instagram and Twitter every day, but from time to time, if you consistently add value and share learnings to your network, you are able to build a following who wants to learn from you.
Many startups aim to push their product out to market as soon as possible, but tend to forget to talk about the human aspects of starting a company. It’s valuable to share the entrepreneurial journey you go through, and be able to talk about it openly. Because founders are a direct representation of the company they are trying to build up, and it will encompass culture, values, and work ethic, that will trickle down to the employees and the output.
Make cool sh!t, help others make cool sh!t, and talk about it.
Our team used to go to college hackathons all the time. We would be a sponsoring team, present a case topic, give students AWS credits to spin up instances, and let them hack using our platform. It got them excited, and mind you — these are the upcoming generations of engineers who will eventually look for jobs, start their own companies or passion projects, or be the one referring your product to an issue at hand. Also, it was refreshing to get an outsider’s perspective on our own product, how they used it, and how they navigated around the documentation we wrote. Additionally, I’d recommend inviting these winning students to come talk about their project and write a blog from their perspective, which helped elevate their career portfolio, as well as created great content for our company blog.
Lastly, if I can leave with any parting thoughts, it is: to be kind to everyone, seriously.
Your personal brand will run very closely with your startup brand. The last thing you want to do is have word go around the grapevine that this startup is being ran by a reckless or dickish CEO. If there is anything you should keep in mind, seriously — just be humble. It’s a very simple thing, regardless of how much funding you’ve received, how many employees now work for you, or how much spotlight you’ve been given.
You’ll be respected and well-liked. Naturally, there are driving forces and people who will want to help you.
Emily is a US expat currently living in Singapore to learn about the tech communities growing in Asia. She has worked 4+ years in dev relations, community management, and event marketing within the tech and travel industry. Her time at OmniSci, Google and Booking.com gave her cross-functional expertise. In her free time, she runs the volunteer community initiatives for Singapore Women’s Network and CMX Hub Singapore, as well as write at The Fang Girl.
