Is There Still Space For Small Budget Marketing?
When you have a new business (or even an existing business), it can be a challenge to find the money for marketing. There always seems to be other areas of business that need funding. But the truth is, without marketing you’re not going to have a business. If your target audience doesn’t know you exist, how will they be able spend any money with you?
Marketing is an investment more than it’s an expense, and it should not be something you don’t fund. Having said that, you can market your business inexpensively and effectively if you know how. There are many small budget marketing techniques that really do work.
10 Low Cost Marketing Strategies
1. Get More Referrals
When you first start out, your friends and connections are important because they can get your foot into the door for great opportunities. Ask your friends, family, and acquaintances for referrals. This is one of the simplest and most basic marketing strategies you can use. As you grow your client base, you can start to incentivize referrals by offering discounts, coupons, and more.
2. Blog More Often and Purposefully
Content marketing is an effective form of marketing that can build your business fast if you publish relevant and interesting content more often. Relevant useful, and engaging website content can go far in helping your business without costing much more than time and effort.
FREE Checklist: How To Run Successful Low Budget Facebook Ads3. Send Out Press Releases
It may not seem like it, but press releases are still a good and free way to get the word out if you do it yourself. You can find a press release, look at the format, and copy that for your own release. Then, send them to people you’ve chosen who will use the information. Get to know your publication’s editors to ensure that you get your releases to the right people.
4. Pay Attention to SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on improving the rankings or visibility of your website on the Internet within search engines like Google and Bing. While you should write your content with your audience in mind first, go back and edit to include important attention to your SEO. Optimize your titles, headers, subheadings by using keywords that your audience would type into search engines. You want to ensure that the search engines send your audience to you because you have authoritative, useful, and engaging content.
5. Cross-Market on Social Media
Every time you publish content, be sure to cross-promote it on social media. This is a good way to get more eyes on your content. One of the simplest ways is to use social media sharing tools on your website. These buttons make easy for your visitors to share your content with their friends, family, and others with built-in social media buttons for your site. The more people share your website and content, the more viral traffic you get. Also ask your readers on blog posts for them to share on social media, join you in groups, and so forth.
6. Build Your List from the Start
Email marketing is still the most effective form of online marketing. It works because people give you permission to send them marketing messages and information. They sign up for it knowing that you’re going to market to them. Therefore they’re more accepting of it and are more likely to click on your links in email than on social media.
7. Use Low-Cost Paid Ads Strategically
If you only want to use low budget marketing ideas it doesn’t mean you can’t use paid ads. Today, it’s relatively inexpensive to run paid ads on platforms like Facebook. The best way to use an advertisement is to build your email list with freebies rather than selling directly.
8. Engage in Effective Small Influencer Marketing
Another way you can use your small budget to get the word out about your products is to use smaller influencers to help you. An influencer is someone who has a following that includes your target audience. Contact influencers and offer them free products, a percentage of sales, coupons for their audience, and even direct pay for their help. A well-planned small influencer marketing campaign can push your startup to the next level.
9. Keep Your Personal Branding Tight
Start off on the right foot by setting up your branding in an informed way. Branding isn’t just for big, multinational businesses. Your brand is all about what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, what they need, and how you’re different. Your branding needs to do all that for your audience. Know your audience, know your product, and understand why you choose the branding you choose (more than that you just like it). Your audience needs to like it first.
10. Use More Video
Some entrepreneurs ignore marketing with video. They think it’s too time-consuming and laborious because of the editing, complicated codecs, aspect ratios and file formats to fiddle with. But modern video marketing software makes it easy to create professional high-quality marketing videos faster and with less effort than ever before. Submitting relevant videos to sites like YouTube (that has over 1 billion people using it every month), Vimeo and other video sharing websites is a great strategy for small budget marketing and can grow your online presence exponentially.
Free Checklist: Small Budget Marketing With Facebook
Marketing your business is something that you can’t ignore. Don’t mistake the idea that you can run a business easily today without having to market it. Budget or not, you must engage in marketing so that people learn about your business and offerings. If you don’t, no one will ever find you.
There’s a good chance your competitors are already harnessing the incredible power of Facebook. There are over 1 billion active daily users on this social media platform just waiting for you to pitch your products and services. The good news for small budget marketing is that you can run a Facebook ad campaign for as little as $5. Download my free checklist, Success With Facebook Ads and make your Facebook ad experience successful and profitable.
