It’s not a hidden fact that marketing is expensive for any business, let alone if you’re a small business on a tight budget. However, it’s undeniable that marketing is a necessity. At the end of the day, if you want your Business to grow, you need to ensure you have a solid marketing strategy to hand. This often poses a huge challenge for small businesses who are on a budget, which, let’s face it, most are. It costs a lot to operate a business, and because other things are also essential for the Business to marketing often gets left as a second thought.
However, there are ways around being a budget when it comes to being a small business; you need to be a little wiser with how you spend your money and try to branch out a little. Have a look at the short guide for getting you to start and hopefully on the right track with your marketing budget:
Business Cards Are Your Best Friend
You should make sure you always have business cards to hand, well in your bag at least.
They are brilliant and probably one of the oldest and simplest ways to market a business without breaking the bank. When meeting potential clients or just talking up your Business (which you should at every opportunity) you can exchange information pretty much anywhere so, make sure prepared. You should be making sure they match your branding and ideally have your name, phone number, website, and social profiles (if applicable) attached. If you’re doing Business to Business, you also included your LinkedIn profile.
Create Content For Online
If you have a website with a blog (which you should), Content marketing is brilliant a successful way of using online to market. It’s completely free unless you choose to outsource for it. It allows you to add in specific keywords, phrases and offer valuable information to your customers while ranking higher in the search engine rankings. The higher you, the higher you will appear when customers search for phrases or words online. If you’re unsure about doing this yourself, you use an SEO Agency to do it for you. You are even able to create the content yourself and then have someone optimize it with SEO ready for posting online. Your blog should be updated consistently and regularly with the new and relevant information only. You should try to have a goal in mind when it comes to creating blog posts such as getting users to subscribe to your email list or get in touch with you to ask about a product or service mentioned in the post.
Email Marketing
While we’re on the topic of getting people to subscribe to a newsletter, let’s talk about email marketing. It’s time to make use of those emails you’ve managed to capture through blogging, social media, and maybe even purchases online. You’re collecting them for a reason, and they shouldn’t be forgotten about and just stored on a database. This is your opportunity to again for free create marketing campaigns to stay in touch with your audience, leads, and customers. Still, there are numerous service that you can outsource to if you don’t want to do this yourself but remember this post is all about being on a tight budget. You should be sending out things such as your latest blog posts, information about the product release, the most recent deals maybe even offer discounts for a repeat customer. Just be wary that you don’t come across too eager and like spam as you will end up losing subscriptions rather than gaining.
Freebies And Trials
Yes, you want to save money so it might seem counterproductive for you to give away services or products, however, it has been proven that offering things such as trials or a small freebie can entice customers to continue purchasing from you so this could lead to an increase in sales rather than a loss from giving away your products. You know your product or service is excellent, so show people this too. A brilliant and increasingly popular way of doing this is reaching out to Instagram influencers and bloggers online to offer them your products and services in return for online content. This works particularly well if you choose high ranking people who have a big relevant following.
There are just a few methods of marketing on a tight budget for a small business, and there are, of course, others for you to try. Do you have any ways that you have used that could help another small business to stick to a budget while still gaining success from marketing? Please share them in the comments section below.
