With a tight marketing budget and limited in-house resources, most small businesses are constantly in search of inexpensive marketing ideas. Creating a big impact while competing with businesses with a bigger budget may seem a like challenge. Well, money isn’t a problem here! With these 10 inexpensive marketing ideas, your business can easily thrive even with a low budget.
1. Publish engaging blog content
Creating a blog and publishing engaging content is the best low budget marketing strategy. The best feature of blogging is that it only costs you your time. Blog content significantly improves your SEO. In fact, 66% of B2B marketers who use blogs generate more leads than those who don’t.
Think of including content that is valuable for the audience. For instance, writing about your best industrial practices or including some frequently asked questions about your business may help you build trust with your customers.
2. Repurpose your content
If you don’t have the budget to regularly produce new content, go for repurposing your content. Instead of spending hours forming new content, give a new spark to your blogs.
Creating eBook guides for particular topics is another great idea. The data in your blogs can be used to create infographics. You can also put across content as a video. A visual format is more beneficial in engaging people.
3. Form an alliance with local businesses.
For a location-based company, forming an alliance with similar local businesses can be an effective marketing strategy. You can team up for a joint campaign or even cross-promote each other, but first, you need to figure out which businesses compliment yours. For instance, a restaurant can collaborate with a bakery.
This free advertising can help you reach audiences that might not even know about your existence.
4. Forming email marketing campaigns
Along with being cost-effective, email marketing is an extremely far-reaching method of promoting your business. It takes bare minimum time to develop an email and create its content. You can include links to blog posts, eBooks and other content as your CTA’s that ultimately guide people to the sales funnel.
5. Ask for referrals
If your current customer is satisfied with your service, it wouldn’t be selfish to ask for a referral or a review. There is a higher chance that the leads you gain this way will already be interested in your brand. In fact, it has been found that referral leads convert 30% better than leads generated from other marketing channels.
To encourage more customer participation, you can offer them discounts or free services for a certain number of referrals.
6. Developing stronger social media connections
Take out some time for building strong relationships on social media. It’s an excellent platform to reach masses and turn them into potential customers.
Make use of your personal connections to ask for referrals. When it comes to delivering content and securing audience engagement, LinkedIn is known to be the most effective social media platform.
7. Organize a social media contest
This again is a strategy that provides you the best return on investment. The question is whether such a contest is applicable to your business! Well, if it goes with your business goals, it can be an effective way of multiplying your audience.
It also gives you an insight of the loyal customer base among your audience.
8. Try guest blogging
When you upload content pieces on sites other than yours, you attract more traffic to your brand. You just need someone to write a blog post, include links to your site and then publish them on a reputable site. It will only cost you time in looking for opportunities. Take help from a professional seo guest blogging agency and try to get the best inbound link for your business.
9. Apply for business awards
In most industries, when you meet certain criteria, you can apply online for business awards. The awarding organization will post your business information on their sites which will help you come out in front of a new audience.
Once you receive an award make sure to post all about it on your site and media pages. This will add reputation and credibility to your brand.
10. Expand your reach in your community
Staying active in your community means that you can build strong relationships and durable partnerships which can be very beneficial for your business in the long run. Make it a habit to attend your networking events. Actively participating in charities and offering donations can also help you gain visibility.
Marketing if put-to-use can yield unprecedented results even on a limited budget. And now that you know the tricks, it’s time for some action!
