Most startups begin without much capital. This means they must think smart and make fast and frugal choices to survive and have the chance to grow. If you want to learn more about how to bootstrap market your app using social media, check out part one of this series of posts!
In this post, we will dive more into some free and affordable tools for content creation and social media management. We will also share more important tips for all of you social media marketing beginners out there.
Whether you have never sent out a tweet before, or are a casual user of a social media site or two, using them to market is different. It requires strategy, effort, and for marketers to be responsive to the constantly changing algorithms of sites and tastes of potential customers and users.
So, let’s get started!
Using The Online Hex Color Tool To Bootstrap Market Your App
You need to come up with an overall visual aesthetic that you will incorporate into social media posts created for your app before you post anything. The colors and images utilized in your branding should be consistant across all channels.
Typically, this means starting with your app’s color scheme or existing company’s branding if applicable. You have to make a choice early on.
Once you have the hex codes for your app’s color scheme (you can even download a free Google Chrome plugin to ‘pick’ colors out of webpages if you need it), you can use them as a jumping off point in Canva’s editor tools to create branded marketing graphics.
Let’s say you’d like some incremental variations based off the colors our amazing designers have crafted for your app. You can use this free hex color tool to find lighter or darker variations of your app’s color scheme and more.
Color can have profound impacts on how we feel. Also, you want your branding to look consistant across all of your materials to avoid confusion. Ideally, it will spark recognition in those who see it, and not cause them to confuse your app with others on the market.
The Online Photo Editor for Backgrounds
Not all of us can be photoshop whizzes.
And that’s okay.
If you’re in a pinch and need to edit the background off of a logo or other image, you can use this free online background editor.
It’s a free, extremely simplified photoshop-like tool that allows you to highlight parts of an image you want to keep in green, and subtracts elements you want out with a red highlighter tool.
The premium version of Canva also includes a Background remover feature, however, you must pay monthly for that. If you are trying to bootstrap market your app with almost no budget, free is usually the way to go.
It’s not without its kinks and certain images come out better than others, but it can be quite useful with practice if you’re in a pinch and need the background edited off of something quickly for free.
Every content creator has been there! Get ahold of assets with transparent backgrounds (PNGs) related to your app, whether it’s logos, app screens, or even in-app elements for future marketing and branding materials.
Having a library with these assets readily available will only help fuel your content creation efforts.
Get Blogging
These days, it’s a given that almost all businesses should have a website, or at minimum a landing page via Linktree, which we will talk about in the next section.
This is because it is a necessity that your app is searchable. How many people can you really talk to about your app in a day? Even if you attend industry events, how many can you and your team really attend in person?
When your app is searchable on Google, this opens it up to the whole world at all times, without limits. While you are sleeping or on vacation you could be achieving conversions and spreading the word, if you set the right pieces in motion beforehand.
A blog provides users with timely content related to your app and shows that you have an active business. This can help to build trust.
Also, if your blogs are SEO optimized, it will help your site index higher in searches. This means that more people will be likely to see your app in google searches. This is critical if you are trying to bootstrap market your app.
Blog content can also help to build your brand and bolster your marketing efforts in other ways. Blog content can be re-used across social media and even inspire content like ebooks, podcasts, and more!
It all depends on the content ecosystem that you want to create. Blogs can also be a way to test the waters and see what your audience responds to and how they respond.
Linktree is Your Blog’s Best Friend
Worried about content? As in, what the social media posts for your app are actually going to be about?
Social media is a natural place to show off any revolving blog content by uploading new posts with the ever-popular “link in bio” message so often seen on Instagram or even Twitter.
Starting a blog on your app’s splash site is a great way to gain early traction for your app and work on building up your app’s SEO, too.
Setting up a LinkTree for your app can not only help establish legitimacy early on, but allow you to drive traffic to several areas of your blog or website by using it as your website URL on social platforms.
Currently, LinkTree offers 4 versions at different price points: Free, Starter, Pro, and Premium. If your startup is really strapped for cash, you can opt for the free version and pay nothing at all.
If you are so early into your project you do not yet have a splash site, that’s where LinkTree can serve as a makeshift portal to shift your audience’s attention to your various social media platforms working hard to get you early traction.
If you don’t have the time to personally write blogs or don’t have anyone dedicated on the team just yet, think about finding a freelance blogger to help out.
In this instance, it is important to be wary of incredibly low prices. There are many businesses and freelancers around the world that produce written content for incredibly low prices, but that is often reflected in the quality.
The last thing you want is to invest money into written content that you cannot actually use to help grow your business,
Social Media Content Management Tools Can Help You Bootstrap Market Your App
You might be reading all of this right now, and wondering where you’re going to find the time to keep up with regularly posting to social media to start building up your app’s eco-system.
Your time is valuable, and while you’ll still need to put the effort and brainpower into figuring out how to best market your app (or find someone who can do all of that for you), there are some incredible tools out there to help you curate your social feeds when it works best for you, not the other way around.
Early on, before you have a dedicated marketing team, these tools honestly can serve as a makeshift marketing employee for you.
These social media content management tools include:
Buffer – You can add up to ten social posts to a queue at once per account for up to three different social accounts for free. It costs more a month to unlock unlimited posts in the queue (for those who really like to plan far out).
Hootsuite – You can add up to ten social posts for up to three accounts free, with various tools to unlock unlimited post queueing.
Hubspot – While HubSpot tends to be a bit more expensive due to having capabilities far beyond just social media management, they offer a pretty good discount for startups, between 30% and 90% off for the first year!
Final Thoughts on How to Bootstrap Market Your App
The truth is, you do not need a massive overflow of capital to market your app in its early days. There are a lot of very affordable and even completely free tools out there which can help you!
The key is to build a content ecosystem around your app that reuses content across multiple platforms in a sustainable way that you can scale and grow.
With this series of posts, we hope to help all of you out there support your apps with smart marketing that can potentially cost nothing at all.
Look out for part three of this series, and be sure to take a look at part one for more in-depth tips on utilizing social media to bootstrap market your app!
What do you think? Comment below.
Since 2009, we have helped create 400+ next-generation apps for startups, Fortune 500s, growing businesses, and non-profits from around the globe. Think Partner, Not Agency.
Find us on social #MakeItAppn®
