Good promotional practices open many doors on the road to success. Their execution, on the other hand, usually requires an ongoing financial investment that some companies could barely afford. Fortunately, there are growth opportunities and applicable marketing tactics for limited budgets that are game-changing for small businesses!
In this article, we present to you our top tips on how to promote your business on a budget.
Before You Start Spending on Promotions...
Set Up a Marketing Budget
Even if your funding is limited, you should always consider planning out your marketing expenses in advance. That way, you know exactly how much you can spend to promote your business. Moreover, it would be easier to spread the money between the different tasks at hand.
Analyze Budget Cuts
If your marketing budget was cut, you need to reconsider your promotional practices. Inevitably some of your underperforming campaigns need to be discarded. And the rest would require a brand new budgeting strategy.
Analyzing the cuts will help you rearrange your priorities and explore new marketing tactics for limited funding.
Find Marketing Channels That Work Best For You
Work with what you’ve already got! Take the time to analyze where your customers are or might be most active, what keeps them interested and what they want to see from your brand. Find the top-performing channels and try to identify if it’s worth the investment to bring you the results you seek.
Alternatively, you can leap of faith and explore new possibilities. See if there are any exciting platforms or channels you can take over, which your clients would be interested in. Then you can start brainstorming low-budget marketing ideas and make them happen.
10 Effective Low-Budget Ideas to Promote Your Business
1. Newsletters
If you are looking for promotional tactics for a limited budget, email marketing is just what you need. Newsletters are the perfect tool to keep your customers engaged with the brand in a long term. To automate the process, you can find email marketing tools at a pretty affordable price.
There are numerous ways to convince your website visitors to subscribe to your service. We suggest, as a good practice, to offer them an incentive in the form of an online coupon, discount code, free guide, access to features, etc.
2. Contests
When your budget is tight, it's the perfect time to excite your customers with a website/social media contest. Get creative with the task and the reward. You don't really need a fancy prize to get people eager to participate. Branded merch, incentives, or custom products will do the trick.
3. Referral Program
People love getting free bonuses! Bring word-of-mouth into the equation and you get the reason why you should start a referral program right now. Take it as an opportunity and provide your clients with a small compliment in exchange for friend referrals.
4. Partnerships
'Businesses support businesses' always looks good in the eyes of the general public. So why not start cooperation with other brands in the same or similar niche? Joint promotions, events, and giveaways will benefit both parties and will provide double the exposure without breaking the bank.
5. Courses, Webinars, Events
Educational courses, lectures, workshops, and online events are a great low-budget method to increase brand exposure and validate expertise. Choose a topic/theme that is close to your business and clients, and let them spread the word.
Add your event on Facebook and share it all across social media to get better online publicity. If you wish to attract an offline audience, you might as well use the traditional method of poster stamping, brochure, and flyer promos.
6. Share Infographics
Infographics are highly shareable content, fun, and easy-to-read. They are those nicely structured images that contain curious facts, basic information, and statistics on a certain topic or field. The power they hold as a promotional tool is huge. So consider it a minimum investment strategy to get traffic and generate clicks, shares, links, and brand mentions.
7. Improve Brand Visibility
Why spend money on promoting your business when it can promote itself organically? Give a boost to your website by focusing on your Local and Global SEO strategy. After all, people who want to use your service or buy your product should be able to find you online with a click of a button.
Efficient SEO practices will rank you among top search engine results and will drive organic traffic to your site. A great opportunity to generate quality leads and respectively increase sales. Sounds good?
Here are our basic SEO tips to focus on:
Use keywords
Optimize website content
Upload new content
Update outdated content
Build backlinks
Revise site structure
Make website mobile-friendly
As for the local rankings, make sure you are registered at Google My Business and your physical locations are visible on Google Maps. Then you need to start working on your reputation management and collect reviews to increase your star rating.
8. Online Reviews
Start collecting reviews and recommendations right now! Positive feedback serves as a powerful promotional tool for low-budget businesses. It authentically represents customer satisfaction and introduces you to potential clients as a trustworthy company.
Online reviews are key to building and validating your online reputation and expertise. Your business should wear its star ratings proudly and always aim at getting good commentary in the digital space.
9. Partner Up with Influencers
Influencer marketing holds amazing opportunities for product-oriented businesses with a limited promotional budget. It provides long-term social media exposure to a new audience and validation of your brand.
Before you start messaging social stars for campaigns, note influencers with a huge following also have high rates. To stick to your low budget, target local and niche-oriented influencers with a mid-range number of followers (5k-100k).
10. Rule Social Media
Social media is one of the most powerful promotional channels. It holds so many possibilities to gain followers and build a community around your business.
What you need to do is be available on the platforms where your customers spend most of their time. And remember, if your business is active on social media, your clients will come to you eventually (or you can invite them).
You don't need a huge marketing budget to be a viral sensation. Just share content the audience wants to see. Spread brand awareness by using relevant hashtags and sharing regular news and updates. For best results - encourage sharing, engage with clients, reply to comments, share customer feedback, and don't forget to redirect users to your site and blog.
Each social platform can help your business differently and present your content to gain a certain advantage. Our advice is, stick to the big social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, TikTok, Reddit, etc.). They offer everything you need to grow and promote your business without spending extra money on paid ads.
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