You know who loves to give advice?
Especially when it comes to marketing.
But what do you do when that advice requires a budgeta budget you dont have?
Operating from a country with such limited resources can be, to put it mildly, challenging.
I founded the company back in 2013.
Four years into it, we pivoted to become a standalone fashion label.
The shift was driven by my desire to make a change in the society I lived in.
At the time, I was working with a woman-run studio, and the seamstress became a single parent.
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And as thebusinessgrew, so did our community of women single parents.
Here, I want to talk about what we did onsocial mediato make it happen.
As a bootstrapped company operating from a country with limited resources, our marketing budget wasand still ispractically non-existent.
Social media was one of the most successful.
Succeeding on Instagram without a budget
Ok, lets rewind for a second.
When we started out back in 2013, Instagram still wasnt a thing.
Thats why it took us a while to get to our desired target market in the United States.
Since we werent located in the U.S., our first few hundred followers were based in Macedonia.
So how did we make it work?
All of our posts and storiesaligned with the narrative we were trying to tell.
Next, we attempted to bridge the gap between our social media strategy and our content strategy.
We began by usingPeople Mapto create a list of the women we wanted to cover on our blog.
We even got traction on our website, since they were sharing the links on their feeds and stories.
you could start small even on social.
That means you gotta engage with the community on another level.
Start a conversation, answer questions, and show that youre an authority on the topic.
Then, if theyre interested in learning more about your brand, you’re able to share links.
This community has 1.7 million members that we knew would be interested in our brand.
We started talking with people on various threads, mostly giving them styling advice.
This gradually evolved into me posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir of course.
People started asking where I got some of the items, so I shared links to the website.
And that did the trick: we saw a tremendous increase in traffic, and orders started rolling in.
And thats just for a mention, not a dedicated brand video.
For a brand like ours, its way too expensive.
Instead, we decided to see if anyone would like our clothes enough to promote them for free.
First, we prepared a list of hundreds of YouTubers whose styles we believed matched our brand aesthetic.
Most of them didnt even respond back, which makes sense.
But the ones that did were so taken by our cause that they selflessly offered to cover our brand.
Heres an example fromChloe Kianand one fromCat Creature.
And how do you find these boards?
PinGroupie lets you find and filter boards according to categories, number of followers, and other criteria.
Were currently members of about eight boards.
The most important one for us is called Fashion + Friends, and it has more than 600k followers.
That means millions of potential customers around the worldwithout investing a single dime.
These boards sent traffic directly to our site and also helped us rank higher on Google.
One tip: go for boards with more than 10k followers.
Boards with fewer followers probably wont do you any favorstheyll just sit on your profile and collect dust.
This article byDaniela Milosheskawas first published on the Zapier blog.
Find the original posthere.
