👻 Influencer marketing collaborates with influencers that fit the brand and your audience, and is a moderate to high-budget strategy, depending on the scale of the influencer and their reach and engagement. It can take a lot of time to leverage influencers, and building and maintaining relationships with them is important, but it does need direct collaboration and authenticity. Investors like this strategy, especially if it involves influencers with strong, relevant followings.

• Identify relevant influencers: Find influencers who fit your brand and audience.

• Collaborate on content: Team up with influencers to create engaging content.

• Influencer takeovers: Have an influencer take over your social media for a day. They can share their experience.

🎲 Paid advertising can take form in Google Ads, Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads and it allows targeting a specific demographic & interests. Investment can be small or large but is infinitely adjustable and requires an expert’s experience in optimizing ad spend and targeting. However, it requires constant care and monitoring. Investors are not big fans of startups that grow with paid advertising, considering it a last resort.

• Targeted ads: Use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads to reach specific demographics.

• Retargeting ads: Target users who have shown interest in your brand.

• Native ads: Blend your ads seamlessly with the content on other websites.

🪤 Email newsletter. It is inexpensive, mostly due to the costs involved in the email marketing software, and demands quite a bit of time to build an email list, send regular updates and provide special discounts. It requires an ongoing creation of content but is best engaged when the list is substantial. It is moderately technical for setup and very important to investors because it allows direct communication with customers, and high engagement potential.

• Build an email list: Collect emails from your website visitors and customers.

• Regular updates: Keep your audience informed with regular company updates.

• Exclusive offers: Give special deals and promotions to your subscribers.

🧨 Social media marketing requires creating high-quality content and regularly posting it on different social networks. It also involves interacting with existing followers, and leveraging paid ads to increase reach. Your budget will depend on how much you are spending on ads and creating new content.

You have to constantly manage your social media accounts by posting and interacting with your followers. Investors regard this as an important tool for branding presence and an effective tool for community-building.

• Consistent posting: Regularly post high-quality content across all social platforms.

• Engage with followers: Respond to comments and messages to build a community.

• Paid social media ads: Use paid ads to reach a broader audience.

🔮 Content marketing. Time-intensive forms of content marketing, such as writing blog posts, guest blogging or producing videos and podcasts, are also typically low to moderate-budget items. Communications professionals like the fact that it works for building authority and that it does have significant and long-term SEO results for an organisation’s brand.

• Blog posts: Write informative articles to attract and engage your audience.

• Guest blogging: Contribute to other websites to build backlinks and credibility.

• Videos and podcasts: Share your story and expertise through engaging videos and podcasts.

🧬 Referral marketing is a popular low-budget strategy that involves setting up referral programmes and encouraging word-of-mouth marketing. It’s easy to set up but needs a loyal customer base that spreads the word and makes it grow organically. Because it fosters customer loyalty, investors are excited by the potential for a return.

• Referral programs: Encourage existing customers to refer new ones.

• Word-of-mouth marketing: Motivate happy customers to share their positive experiences.

✂️ PR. Moderate-budget channel: Public relations, such as press releases and media outreach. Obtaining media coverage can be challenging and requires careful planning. Effective PR is treated positively by investors as it helps increase credibility and visibility.

• ​​Press releases: Announce new products, services, or milestones through press releases.

• Media outreach: Contact media outlets and journalists for coverage and interviews.

🪩 Events and webinars are about organising conferences, meetups, workshops, online seminars et cetera. Depending on the scale and the production quality, the strategy is either moderately or very high budget. A significant amount of planning and organisation is needed. Direct engagement and networking opportunities, as well as thought leadership are of value to investors.

• Host events: Organize conferences, meetups, and workshops to connect with your audience.

• Webinars: Educate your audience about your products or services through webinars.

🎞 Partnerships & collaborations mean making alliances with other companies with complementary businesses. It is a low to moderate budget plan, which shares the resources and not the costs directly. This requires negotiations and continuous coordination with the partners. The investors highly appreciate this for the expansion of reach and making use of complementary strengths.

• Strategic partnerships: Partner with businesses that complement yours to expand your reach.

• Collaborative content: Create content with other businesses to tap into new audiences.

🔌 User-generated content. Consumers are asked to provide user-generated content, for example, by contributing their photos in exchange for the chance to be recognised (marketing campaigns inviting customers to submit their content for a chance to be featured are an example of user-generated content) or sharing a photo of them using your product. This approach is low-budget and mostly consists of encouraging your customers to participate (often by offering incentives). Managing user-generated content means engaging and promoting the campaign to encourage users to participate. Investors consider this a good strategy for brand or community engagement/participation.

• Encourage user-generated content: Get customers to share their experiences with your product.

• User-generated content campaigns: Run campaigns to collect and showcase customer content.