When there are only a few of you in your business, it can be difficult to market yourself, especially with the limited marketing budget of a small business. Whether it’s announcing a new product on social media or attending a trade show, you want to be seen and heard, and you can make it happen with these inexpensive marketing ideas. Wondering how to market your small business on a budget?
Why should small businesses invest in marketing?
Make no mistake, executing a marketing strategy in small businesses can be very rewarding if executed well. You will be able to …
- gain better visibility with potential customers
- take advantage of a series of tools and platforms to help you shape your brand
- achieve a better understanding of how your customers perceive your products and your brand
- deliver more value, engage and entertain your customers, including through content marketing and social media
- learn new skills and make useful contacts
Combine the power of digital marketing and offline marketing
When defining your marketing strategy, be sure to keep the right balance between your online and offline marketing. Whatever your primary strategy, you may have a genuine interest in combining both approaches. It is therefore important to know all the opportunities available to you in order to be able to take full advantage of your marketing strategy.
- The online marketing is all about respect to digital, including in particular social networks, websites, emails and online advertising
- The offline marketing concerns all your activities and physical media such as print media, physical sales and trade shows
Read on to learn all about the best performing online and offline marketing strategies, and discover marketing ideas that are right for your business and your budget.
Professional advice for your social networks
When it comes to marketing, social networks are extremely valuable tools. They are free, easy to use, and have a large following of users who spend considerable time on them. It’s the perfect place to communicate effectively without spending a fortune.
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- Choose a platform that’s right for you and your audience
Small business marketing initiatives are more likely to be successful on social media if you are already familiar with the platform. List the social networks you already use and see if your audience is there. If not, you will need to broaden your search. On the other hand, if your audience is there, it is a good idea to explore this channel.
- Bet everything on visual content
The duration of online attention is getting shorter. This is why the visual feeds that can be found on Pinterest or Instagram, for example, make it possible to create content that is fast, attractive and easy to consume, while offering the possibility of getting your message across. Favor posts that mix inspiring content and promotional links to your products and services.
- Create Value with Instagram Stories
Stories are a very popular tool on Instagram, and brands of all sizes, large and small, are thinking about creative ways to tap into this ‘channel within the channel’. A Story is by nature ephemeral. It disappears after a day (although you can create Stories Highlights if you have an important message that you want to keep over time). They’re perfect for promoting a new product release, teasing an important event, or facilitating a question-and-answer session between your brand and your audience.
Blog and editorial content
If there’s one thing that everyone agrees on in small business marketing, it’s the power of storytelling. By creating a blog you will be able to transform your professional adventure into valuable content. Blogging is a much older practice than most social media outlets, but it’s a great way to tell inspiring stories to your community, and as an added bonus, it can add great SEO value to your site. Here are some great inexpensive marketing ideas to help you make your business blog a powerful medium for your readers …
- Focus the visual aspect of your blog
Give your blog some must-have visual appeal with high-quality photos and visuals. Not only do they lighten up the text and bring more interest to it, but they can help customers get more information about the products or services you offer. Creating an infographic is also a good way to boost the visual appeal of your blog. If you can afford it, it would be a shame to deprive yourself of it! Infographics are a simple and fun way to illustrate or explain an idea through an attractive visual. Because of its accessible format and useful content, it’s an extremely viral medium, which is easily shared and will have its place on your blog.
- Grow your audience by posting a guest post
Bloggers can team up to grow their audience by agreeing to write a guest post for other people’s blogs. It’s a great way to get your name known to a new group of readers who are interested in your topic but might not have discovered you otherwise. Setting up this type of partnership gives you access to a much larger audience and it’s a fun form of networking too. Search for potential partners using commonly used hashtags on social media, such as #foodblogger.
- Introduce user-generated content
Since their inception, blogs have always been about community engagement. Celebrate your customers and fans by posting the content they’ve posted on your blog. It’s also a way to show the value of your product, as you can include customer testimonials, show ingenious ways people have used your products, and share stories of how they’ve made a difference in life. For example if you are leads generation company then use terms like cheap final expense leads. Collecting user-generated content in a blog post makes the information permanent and showcases it, rather than devoting fleeting space to it.
Everything for a top email marketing
Encourage customers to subscribe to your mailing list (perhaps by including articles from your famous blog). By doing this, you increase the possibilities of interacting with them without spending a dime. If you’re new to digital marketing, don’t be put off by the many specialized terms like conversion rate, click-through rate, re-engagement campaigns, and more. Just start. And if email marketing is right for you, there’s nothing stopping you from going further down the road. So here are some key tips for a successful email marketing strategy.
- Offer added value
To prevent your emails from ending up in your customers’ trash, you must become a privileged interlocutor by offering them quality content, every time you make contact. Whether it is sharing news about your business, a summary of content from other websites, exclusive promotions or even access to private sales, make sure that your email marketing campaigns are always a pleasure to open. Remember that many of your readers can access their emails from their smartphones, so make sure your email is mobile and desktop friendly.
- Create a drip marketing campaign
A drip marketing campaign or “drip marketing” is a strategy that aims to send a set of communications automatically to your subscribers and in response to certain behaviors. The automation of mailings makes it possible to lighten the work of e-mailing campaigns. For example, you could have a sample email that would be sent automatically when a new contact signs up to your mailing list, or when someone hasn’t opened your emails for a while. You can also use the behaviors of your customers on the web, such as purchases or visits to certain pages, as triggers.
