To lower your cost of marketing by embedding the marketing efforts into the product itself and let it grow!
There are many of growths strategies for your product, online marketing, physically promotions, event holding...all these relates to cost. Spending money on Facebook, Linkedin, 3rd party websites, magazines, billboards...to capture the opportunity to get in front of the audiences.
How about let the product grow itself? To let embed the marketing efforts into the product and let it grow! So how is it done? Lets take a few case studies...
Have you heard of or play of the game called Candy-Crush? It is a mobile game where players has to align the same type of candy together to wipe out the candies in order to accomplish the tasks. After a few levels into the game, the game requires you to share the game with your friends on Facebook, inviting them to come play the game in order for your to unlock the next level in the game. What would you do if you really enjoyed the game? I think most of us will share it without hesitation. As result, the game gets spread among the players. Let's say if the game requires each person to share to five of their friends on Facebook, then thats 1 turning into 5, if the 5 people enjoyed the game, they will each share it to 5 of their friends too, thats 5 turning into 25. As this pattern continues, 25, 125, 625, 3125, 15625, 78125, 390625...you get the idea. If your product is good enough, it would be spread very fast at an exponential rate.
Have you used a cloud storage service called dropbox before? Dropbox is an b2b / b2c cloud storage service company. A user can signup up for the service for free. At first you would be provided with a few gigabytes of storage space. Then you start to save your pictures from your personal life, your documentations from work...onto the cloud storage platform. A few month later, you realized that you have almost used up all the storage space available. Now, there are two options for you to increase your storage space. One is to pay for the additional storage space, the other is to invite your friends to use Dropbox. If your friends decides to signup for the dropbox then you get a few additional megabytes of storage space.
The first step to embed your marketing into your product is to create a kick ass product that customers love. A product that customers cannot get enough of and are willing share it with their friends in order to get more of it. The second step is to create sufficient incentive for your customers to be motivated to complete the task. For instances, how many additional level to release on the Candy-Crush game? How many additional free storage space to give out? Lastly, make your task easy to completed. For instance if you would like the customer to share the product on Facebook with their friends, make sure you have connected the APIs between your platform and Facebook seamlessly, make sure that there are no breaking points in the process.
At the end of the day, be creative with the program that you bring to your customers and let the product speak for itself.