Marketing a business is about promoting your products or services by increasing their visibility, findability, appeal, and rationale among your target audience so that they become your loyal and repeat customers. Product or service marketing covers an entire spectrum of activities, from using market research for proper product development and ensuring a product-market fit to designing banners and calls to action. It can also include negotiating a deal with an intermediary who asks his contacts to hire your services or buy your products. Whatever way you choose, the end goal of a successful marketing strategy is to find prospects and transform them into customers of your products and services.
However, the entire gamut of marketing costs money. From the perspective of small business owners, marketing would be affordable and meaningful only if it can be done at a reasonable and profitable cost to their company. Having said that, here are the 10 proven marketing strategies for small businesses operating on a tight budget.
1. Know your audience: A critical mistake is thinking that everyone is your target buyer and failing to narrow down to clear segments. Big businesses can appeal to a vast market, but when you are a small business, your riches are in the niches.
2. Double-down on what works: Offer free trials or samples of your products and services to attract new customers. Once you have run pilot campaigns and your data shows what works, narrow down your campaign strategies.
3. Generate word-of-mouth marketing: Turn employees into brand ambassadors, and encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences with others using referrals and incentives.
4. Increase local visibility: Create a free Google My Business account and profile to increase visibility for local businesses. You can also host an event or class. Print flyers and post them or distribute them through newspaper vendors to institutions, associations, business entities, and individuals.
5. Use PPC advertising: PPC or pay-per-click advertising might involve a tough bidding war when you’re launching a campaign, but it’s one of the best marketing strategies for small businesses as you can track both expenses and conversions transparently.
6. Use coupon deal sites: Coupon deal sites can attract customers according to their locations and run limited-time offers targeted to specific geographies. The links also matter to your SEO.
7. Use social media: Leverage social media platforms without spending money on advertising but by focusing on where your audience is. Engage with your customers by responding to comments and offering solutions.
8. Use email marketing: Email marketing is still one of the best ways of relationship management and product promotion. But one should be careful about cold emailing. For a small business that depends on the internet to harvest unknown customers, being marked as a spammer can be harmful.
9. Collaborate with other small businesses or influencers: Attend networking conferences and events to meet potential customers and partners in your industry. Motivate people to discuss your products and services and explore new business relationships.
10. Create and disseminate valuable content: Generating and sharing appealing and insightful content such as blog posts, videos, or infographics that educate and engage your audience can prove immensely useful for building trust and credibility.Small business owners with low budgets can easily follow the strategies mentioned above. However, they should keep in mind that any marketing strategy can become expensive if it is not tweaked suitably to achieve a high conversion rate according to the business model and target market. It doesn’t take long for a low-cost avenue like Google PPC to become overwhelmingly costly if your campaign goes wrong due to incorrect targeting or the wrong choice of keywords. So, it all starts with knowing your audience, which is the first point on this list.
