#Creating a Marketing Strategy Without Much Money
“Social media was way cheaper. Posters didn’t work.”
-Samuel Njuguna
Most startups face this challenge in their early days, they need to market their product and build their customer base, but they don’t have many resources to do it. Chura faced this problem as they tried to build their mobile data, money, and minutes transfer service from their university dormitories. They had time and determination, but very little money.
So what did they do? To begin, they came up with several hypotheses and tested them.
##A Strategy Starts with Ideas
“We tried putting posters in schools, giving talks in the university, dishing our fliers in public, and also to motorists. But it turns out, the city council wouldn’t allow giving out fliers without paying a fee… we got creative with the fliers - paid newspaper vendors to slip them in newspapers”
-Samuel Njuguna
Chura began by thinking about their customer segments, what marketing professionals would call creating buyer personas. They wanted to target students, working class professionals, and Kenyans who were more tech savvy. So they developed cheap marketing channels for each. To target students, they handed out fliers on campus and gave talks at their university. For the working class professionals they woke up early and handed out fliers, for tech savvy Kenyans they created Facebook ads.
They ran into problems, but knew that’s how testing marketing ideas works. When the city council told them they had to pay a fee to hand out fliers, they began paying newspaper vendors to slip them into the morning papers that professionals read. Chura knew that even a limited budget could afford printing fliers, paying newspaper vendors, giving speeches, and paying for a few Facebook ads.
But critically, they started with several strategies and didn’t spend too much money on any of them until they knew what would work and what wouldn’t.
##Choosing Winning Idea(s)
“On the dishing out of the posters, we came to realize it wasn’t working very well. It was very hard for the student to single out a single poster and read it… what was working was giving talks in the universities and also trying a bit of online social media marketing with good conversion rates. For example the fliers, we were doing them in the morning, posters in the afternoon, social media in the evening”
-Samuel Njuguna
After trying out several of their ideas for a while, Chura collected as much information as they could to understand which ideas were working and which weren’t. As we mentioned in the Using Metrics to Make Decisions lesson, this wasn’t done based on just a feeling. So what did they learn?
First, posters and fliers really just didn’t work. Their customers didn’t seem to have time to read them. But while that seemed clear just from watching people take them, what really told them which strategy was working was asking their customers how they found out about Chura. That told them that Facebook ads were the answer.
“We went ahead and started asking customers how they learned about us, the majority said they saw a Facebook ad. It’s a no brainer, that’s where our marketing was working so that’s where we focused.”
-Samuel Njuguna
##Using Limited Resources
Ultimately, Chura learned that while there is marketing you can do for free, like giving speeches at their university, there was still plenty they could do for very little money. That meant paying for fliers and posters as well as putting a few dollars a day into Facebook ads.
Once they could figure out which channel worked based on data, they could feel confident in putting more of their limited resources into that channel. For them it was Facebook ads, but for your business it could be promoters, fliers, customer exchange programs, or any number of other channels.
Now, Chura has over 3,000 users every month and around 70% repeat users. That means their marketing channels are bringing the right kind of users to them. Getting there didn’t necessarily take a lot of money, it took trying a variety of ideas and finding out what worked.