What is flexible marketing?

Given limited resources, what is the best possible marketing strategy to grow a young web design business?

• Here are the facts: 6 months ago, myself and two peers started a company. The (long-term) goal is to create an internal incubator: a place where we have the time, money and skills to realise our own ideas. To get to the above mentioned goal, we intend to bootstrap the company. That is, we are not going to use any external financing. Instead, we render a set of services and use the profit of these sales to finance the growth of the company. Currently our service offerings are packaged as follows, sorted according to average level of experience (from high to low): Website design Graphic design Website development Digital publishing Mobile application development Cash is low at the moment. After a bit of strategising, I realised that, because of the generic nature of our service offerings, investing in marketing will probably yield the best ROI at this stage of in the company’s life (I might be wrong of course). The basic line of thinking is this: investment in marketing will yield a specific marketing strategy, and investing into this strategy will yield a sustainable inflow of leads, which will generate a sustainable inflow of funds. These funds could be plowed back into marketing, creating a virtuous cycle. We then scale proportional to the increase in sustained leads. Here is the plight: I know absolutely nothing about marketing, but it is crucial for me to build my understanding of marketing holistically. What are the essentials about marketing that I need to know? Given the facts stated above, what are the best specific marketing strategies we must pursue to yield the best ROI? Finally, where should I spend my effort and money to obtain an understanding of these specific marketing strategies?

• Answer:

  The first thing you're going to need to know about marketing: The "generic nature of (y)our service offerings" will be the death of you. There are loads of website design firms out there- why should I use you? Are you faster? Cheaper? More sensitive to my needs? Do you give me more options to choose from? Are you more fun and entertaining to interact with? Are you going to guide my beginner ass and make it a simple, painless process for me, or are you going to respect my intellience and guarantee me a professional, classy experience? Your best ROI  at this stage will come from figuring out the answers to all these questions and then some. - Marketing is the deliberate communication of value that's intended to influence consumer behavior. To do that effectively, you need to know who your target audience is. Try to speak to everybody and nobody will listen. (Very, very few things ever got away with "marketing to everybody". Facebook started out by giving college students something they wanted, and it expanded from there.) You need to develop a very, very clear picture of the person who's going to really, really want to pay you for your services. A thorough understanding of this person will help you identify what you need to do to persuade him to buy your stuff. What are the problems she has, and how is she going to try to find a solution to them, and how are you going to convince her that your solution is best? All of this is marketing. It's all of the iceberg that's under the water. All the other things- a social media strategy, a content marketing strategy, etc- is emergent from that fundamental insight. When it comes to design, nothing speaks louder than a portfolio. If you're good at website design, then design a few good sites and put them on a site of your own. Describe what you can and will do for others. Get testimonials from people. Reach out to people who have problems in the space you're working in, and help solve their problems. You'll find them on forums, on social media, and they'll be Googling to find you, too. But all of that is secondary- first figure out what exactly you're selling, and who (specifically) will want to buy it.