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37 Comments

How would you market B2B product with little budget for paid marketing?

Hi everyone!

I'm Ivana and I'm in HR for the last couple of years, just a few months ago with 2 friends that are developers I started working on my first product called AsyncHire -> https://asynchire.com/

We released a Beta Landing page, last Friday and just with our Twitter ACC, publishing Upcoming Page on PH we managed to get 5 companies already that signed up for our Beta release

Now we are getting close to that release, and I never have done any marketing before, I tried a few paid ads and realized that this space is very competitive and that we would need a lot of money to get our ads shown to any good leads

Does anyone have similar experiences with advertising products for Businesses and do you have some advice on how I should approach all this?

My main fear is that I'll get burned out with big expectations and no results from paid marketing

Thanks in advance!

  1. 8

    For initial traction, I would recommend leveraging online communities. I wrote up a guide on using online communities at each stage of the startup journey but the TLDR is that for free you can do the following:

    1. Find people in those communities talking about the pain points you can solve, and reach out to them
    2. If it's within the community's rules for self-promotion, let the community know about the problem you're solving and that they can reach out to you if they have this need
    1. 2

      This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks a lot!

  2. 3

    Hi Ivana!

    You might consider putting marketing on the back burner for now and instead focus on sales. You've got 5 companies already... that's great! How did you get them interested? I recommend building a small but loyal customer base first and then investing in marketing.

    How?

    Identify key decision makers in companies. Reach out to them—educate them on how your product will benefit them. Will it save them time, money or other resources?

    Offer a free trial.
    Have a referral program in place.

    If you've got a good product with real benefits—you should have success with this approach.

    1. 1

      Hey @SweaterHacker yes I believe that's something we are going to do for now

      I was thinking of going directly to companies that registered in Beta soon when we get the product in the state where we covered all the main functionality we defined for the first step, offer them a 1 year completely free plan, and let them give us all the feedback they can so we can see where to focus next :D

      1. 2

        I second what @SweaterHacker says - its such an early stage, and since you are B2B, sales makes a lot more sense than Marketing. You can upgrade to marketing once you have a good handle on your perfect target customer, as well as have nailed pricing strategy.

        I'd be vary of giving things away for free just to get feedback - try to sell. The moment someone pays for you, their feedback becomes a lot more valuable. Also it's a much stronger validation once someone pays even a little bit; so you could make it cheaper, but my suggestion at least would be to try to make it paid.

        1. 2

          @asynchire Completely agree with @shenoyroopesh. And in any case, them paying you is the best feedback you can get. You will always have time to tweak and improve.

          You might still use “free” for a short trial (30 days or less) Just so to demonstrate your products capabilities.

          You might also create a special offer for early adopters and first wave customers. Example: “First 50 subscribers get grandfathered in at $. After that price goes up to $$$.

  3. 3

    Hey Ivana! Super cool product! I work in B2B marketing and am building my B2B startup as well. Would love to maybe connect at some point and share learnings and frustrations :).

    Anyway, this is how I've been thinking about B2B marketing:

    • Would start focusing on content and SEO as of now. It takes time but it really compounds. These can be blog posts, Twitter posts, videos, podcasts, or all of then ;)
    • The best marketing teams, even in B2B, are becoming media experts. Invest time in building a social media presence - TikTok for lead generation and then convert the true fans onto IG and LinkedIn or whatever your main channel is. Recycle the content from one platform to another.
    • Influencer marketing. Without a budget, maybe focus on royalties or equity. But make the deal performance-oriented. Don't give the whole batch of equity straight up.
    • Referral programs. This without a budget isn't the best, but sometimes offering something other than money can work. On your case, perhaps a free consultation or free access to interview prep or cover letter guides.
    • Founder-influencer. Marketing has always been about people-to-people. And B2B marketing is more and more becoming about buying from a person. So transform yourself into an influencer on your topic. Use Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, Substack and really cultivate that personal brand. Something I'm starting to experiment but have seen great benchmarks of success doing this.

    Highly recommend checking out everything that Dave Gerhardt, Kyle Lacy, Domm Holland, and Ish Baid are doing on social media.

    Also, if you have any other tips and tricks I'd love to hear about them! :)

    1. 1

      You hit on the interesting point of content recycling. This was super useful for me in growing my foodie platform going between a newsletter and IG. However, it was a bit laborious and painful to recycle content, so I set out to create https://newslettertosocials.com which automatically generates social media activity from written content. I use it myself for my own newsletters and it helps quite a bit! Happy to let you try out our paid plans too, just let me know!

    2. 1

      Thanks for a detailed comment! I completely agree on Founder-influencer will definitely try to research influencers space for my product and see how they can help us

      Also thanks a lot for - Dave Gerhardt, Kyle Lacy, Domm Holland, and Ish Baid, means a lot and, and give me a lot of contexts to work on!

  4. 1

    Others have given great feedback but I throw my hat into the ring, hopefully, it'll be useful to you in some way!

    Step 1 - Step up your organic content game. Be active on relevant social media (Linkedin) and blog and build a brand. It prepares the playing ground for paid advertising.

    Step 2 - Use your budget scarcely to promote your content and gain initial visitors to your website. When you have massive players in the field, they'll out-pay you in advertising. Focus on low search volume/low competition keywords in your blog. It'll help you optimize your budget.

    Step 3 - Map your funnel. All touchpoints where people meet your brand and where they decide to give it a try. What you can measure, you can improve. Double down on that.

    Step 4 - Step up cold outreach on Linkedin + Step 1. People pitch out of the blue all the time. I suggest adding 50 people per week, streaming your content, and reaching out to people who react. Not the other way around. Prepare for many NOs.

    Step 5 - To make your advertising more effective, talk to your sales team AND your customers. Find out their frequent pain points. Use that as copywriting ammunition.

    Step 6 - Paid advertising is not an end-all-be-all. With almost all verticals being saturated nowadays, focus more on being present everywhere with highly relevant content. Build a community.

    Step 7 - Join communities (like this one) and be helpful. It's also a brand building tactic and counts as organic content strategy, too.

  5. 1

    If you are just getting started, I would recommend doing things that do not scale in the beginning. For a product in HR niche, cold outreach can do wonders. For ToolsonCloud CRM , we tried multiple marketing techniques in the beginning and finally settled down to a few which works.

    Building scale with SEO will take time, but we should be fearless towards doing outbound sales in beginning. In the beginning, entrepreneurs may be a bit hesitant to do cold emails, calls, messages but that will soon disappear with time once you start getting responses.

    Not everyone may say "Yes", but when someone says "No", they will definitely give some feedback to improve upon. Another way you can improve the response rate is by social selling approaches. Building a personal brand on social media doesn't mean you will start getting leads from social media. It will just build your brand so that whenever you do cold outreach to someone in your network, at least your messages will be read and you shall get some response.

  6. 1

    I would focus heavily on SEO with a focus on JBTD (Jobs to Be Done). Check out Friday's content for example: https://friday.app/p. It's heavily focused on fulfilling the jobs that their target user would have - working remotely, working across timezones, etc.

  7. 1

    Hey @asynchire! Really great product. RE free marketing, I'd focus on 3 main strategies...

    1. SEO/Content Marketing: Find out what your ideal customer's biggest pain points and questions are. Then create a ton of valuable content around solving/answering them and publishing it on your blog, social, and guest posts.
    2. Build Your Audience: Create an "HR Hiring Club" Facebook Group and direct as many of your ideal customers into it as possible. Cultivate that community with value through engagement and directing them to your thought leadership content (see point #1).
    3. Own Your Audience: Create lead magnets (white papers, templates, mini tools, etc) that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. Capture these leads on your website as well as a required question when people go to join your Facebook Group. Now that you own your audience via email, continue to provide (non-promotional) value to them through a newsletter

    Hope this helps!

    Feel free to reach out to me with any questions ([email protected]). I'd be happy to walk you through it or refer you to other helpful resources.

  8. 1

    I won't focus on paid marketing at all.

    Instead - focus on ROI-based content marketing - so content that targets high-intent keywords (usually a very narrow audience), but has high conversions.

    You'll easily rank there (and stay on TOP positions for a long time) + start getting 10,20,30 or more high-quality leads each month per article.

    Lemme know if you need help with it, I can give you some guidance and insights. Happy to help!

    1. 1

      Hey Ugi, do you have some advice on the content itself, should I look to hire someone or it's enough if I just start writing stuff in my free time? How much volume do you expect is needed?

      1. 1

        Well, if you're not familiar with it - hiring some experts would always be the best option.

        however, you can also start writing content by yourself (but if you have budget, I would advise to hire someone, since they already went through the trial and error process you'll need to go through).

        I'm not a fan of content velocity - writing A LOT of content each month.

        I think quality is always better than quantity.

        So if you have time to write 2 articles a month, then write 2. Don't sacrifice the quality for the sake of quantity.

        However, we with our clients always aim to publish at least 3-4 ROI-based content pieces a month.

        Start by focusing on some high-intent search terms. ie:

        • [Competitor Name] alternatives
        • best tools for [use case]
        • how to [problem that you solve]

        Etc. Those search terms are more specific - search volume will be low (0 - 50), but anyway, if you rank, you'll start getting 100+ organic visitors per article.

        If the content is well written, conversions can be between 5-20%. So 5-20 people will convert into free trials each month for each article that gets traffic (in case they get 100 visitors a month, perhaps they'll get less/more).

        Hope this helps!

        1. 1

          re @asynchire,

          I just saw you're still in beta.

          I would also advise partnering up with some relevant communities on the web to get beta users (I assume access to the beta is free) - try to look for them at FB, Slack, Reddit.

          1. 1

            Perfect, you helped us a lot with this! We now have a picture where we can start from!

            1. 2

              No worries! Always happy to help.

              Love seeing our people in the SaaS world ;)

              1. 1

                Same here :D wish you all the best!

  9. 1

    In our experience the two cheapest options for advertising have been:

    • Participating in online communities.
    • Boosting LinkedIn (+ maybe Twitter) posts that link to blog posts.
  10. 1

    Good luck to you Ivana - Venkat

  11. 1

    Hi @asynchire, here are some case studies from my database that can help you:

    1) Surveys

    Who: used by Chanty – a simple and easy to use team chat

    What is it about: Using a Google Form + Reaching out on LinkedIn to build a target audience / marketing of their own product

    Result: Building up a network of CEOs and founders that answers to their questions within a month

    • Search for "Build a target audience on LinkedIn" on GrowthHunt.co to see the exact case study or select the "Surveys" tab to view similar case studies on this topic.

    ---

    2) A Lead Magnet (Create content that solves current problems)

    What is it about: What are other questions in your product's field that your users would faced? Example: how to conduct an effective video interview etc.

    You can create a guide that lists down the top 10 or 20 ways or best practices to conduct an effective interview over video.

    • Search for "Create content that solves current problems" on GrowthHunt.co to see the exact case study or select the "Content" tab to view similar case studies on this topic.

    ---

    Feel free to reach out to me. Happy to help.

    Cheers!

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot, this was very informative!

      1. 1

        While you are here, could you spare me 1 min and take a look at my site and give me some feedback please?

        I built GrowthHunt.co as a database of business growth case studies to help business founders grow their business (get more subscribers, optimize their pricing plans etc).

        As a founder and entrepreneur yourself, why would you not pay for access to my product?

        Appreciate any feedback!

  12. 1

    Hi Ivana,

    I love the aiming higher attitude you have! What I mean by that, you already have 5 companies signed up for the beta, that is already a very good start, and you won't need marketing for now.

    My advice is to focus those only for now. Do interviews with them, learn about their pain/problems with their current product, ask more than pitch at this stage, listen more than talk when interviewing them, as you need to solve the problems those companies have. They signed up for a reason after all.Once you're done with that, build what they need and make sure you get all of them buying your product. That should already eat up a lot of your time and focus at this stage.

    Once you have those 5 companies "happy", then marketing would be much easier for you, and most probably you won't need paid marketing for some long time from now.

    Some questions you might need for your interviews:

    1. What is the hardest part doing X?
    2. Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem
    3. Why was that hard?
    4. What, if anything, have you done to solve this problem?
    5. What you don’t love about the solution you’ve tried?

    Hope this helps!

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot Hussam! Yes interviews are definitely something we are thinking about doing, also your boilerplate for questions helps a lot to understand the procedure!

  13. 1

    Hi Ivana,

    I'm confused what you are asking. You already have 5 companies signed up for the Beta release. If those companies actually use your Beta then that's way more than enough to keep you busy.

    If you go beyond 5 companies on a Beta then it's not a Beta anymore - just a new product release. For B2B skipping Beta is not a good idea so not sure what you are after at this stage. Honestly 5 might already be too many - Slack went internal, then one, then two, etc.

    1. 1

      Also, my main fear was that this is a small number, looks like I had my expectations higher then needed

    2. 1

      Thanks a lot! I just have never done this before so it's completely new for me
      So thanks for your answer I was not aware of that

      Let's say for the state when we are out of Beta, what would you suggest as the main channel for marketing?

      1. 1

        That depends on your appetite for funding. Again with 5 companies recommendations raising seed should be possible.

        You are getting far ahead of yourself and without my knowing why its not possible to advise. However if you need a solution for development process / communication let's talk!

        1. 1

          Well, my main concern from the communication standpoint is that I don't want my product to be looked at as "spammy" so from your own experience do you think collecting emails, sending direct msgs to companies on LN and other sources is something it's fine?

          1. 1

            We are cross talk here. If I were you:

            1. Finish the beta successfully
            2. Finish the beta successfully
            3. Consider funding having finished the beta successfully and being able to use those 5 companies as reference
            4. Sometime next year after funding see what advertising does for you
            5. Only if the advertising fails consider direct email etc.

            Your whole premise is that you don't have a lot of budget for marketing but if you successfully complete a 5 company beta you can get funded and so there goes that premise.

            However if you need help with engineering development process during the beta please consider Uclusion.

            1. 1

              That all makes sense! Thanks a lot, you are completely right that 5 companies is enough for finishing the Beta first, also thanks for the link, I currently have 2 dev friends that are working on platform part-time, but if that expends will consider Uclusion

  14. 0

    Hello Ivana,

    Great product & congrats.

    I will recommend you usealbus.ai

    Albus brings communities on social media into ad groups with a privacy-led perspective. Albus helps you find macro and micro affinities, explore consumption trends, your audiences’ community interactions, and provide actionable keyword outputs for high conversion ads.

    Fast and easy; just by typing a couple of descriptive sentences about your audience or picking a convenient influencers’ audience, you can handle hours of marketing intelligence work in minutes. Albus will implement the outputs instantly to the Google Ads.

    No need for cookies or customer data. Just a description of your target audience is enough.

    Albus AI is looking for its beta users. We will recommend youcredits up to 10.000$ and unlimited features.

    Best,

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