When it comes to low budget marketing, small businesses suffer a lot because of two reasons. One is that they have a large competitors pool and another is they have too little budget to invest. It’s very hard to cost-effective marketing strategies while keeping up with the expenses and competitors.
Here, we’ll discuss a few ideas for cost-effective (low budget) marketing strategies useful primarily for small businesses.
1. Create a story of your business
When you enter the market, people do not even make an effort to know you and remember your name as there are already many businesses around them. Many businesses die unheard. The first step of marketing is to make a presentation. Let others remember your name by your niche. For this, you have to create a story that makes your brand into the people’s minds. Grab some causes or points which are fit for your business and create a mind-capturing story so that people around you can notice you. The story should be made focusing on your unique selling point (USP), current strategies and future plan of market penetration. You should keep in mind that your story is your advertising content. Prepare it with your best effort.
2. Know your audience and their location
The audiences of your advertising content are your potential customers. You must already estimate the number of customers you are trying to attract prior to establishing the business. Now, it’s time to locate where they are living so that you can know where you are going to tell your story (your advertising content).
3. Find someone with large followers (influencer)
When you show your product/service to people, there is a high chance that you will be ignored. The possible reason might be that you are not new in the market and people already have their service/product provider. Now what you have to do is find some people who have good numbers of fans/followers in society. For example, celebrities, politicians, social workers, etc. Make a deal or partnership with them to try your product and recommend it to others. It is known as influencer marketing. The initial step is to find your influencer. There are mainly two types of influencers. One is earned influencer and another is paid influencer. The earned influencer is someone you already have a good relationship with or someone who actually likes your product/service and announces it publicly. The paid influencer requires sponsorship and the amount varies with the number of people you might reach through them.
4. Organize events
Calling people in events helps you come closer to like-minded people (possibly might be your competitors) and your potential customers. While thinking of organizing an event, you might get scared as you think it will cost you high. No, it’s not. It depends on how tricky you can be. For example, if there is an event for cleaning the environment, planting or some other social cause, go there and distribute free bottles of water from your company, talk to them and appreciate them. As the event is going to get so much attention, you might make yourself to the news and publications.
5. Use social media marketing
Nowadays, everyone is on social media. Nowadays, from a child to grandparents having social media accounts, it’s always beneficial to be there. There are three main reasons to be on social media.
- Large demographics
- Different locations
- Low cost
The number of followers and the engagement you have on your social media profiles also reflect the reputation you have on these platforms. Creating a reputation in the initial phase may seem difficult but the rigorous updates and interactions with your followers surely increase your brand recognition. Also, at the starting phase, you can use services like Instagram follower boosters which can give you that initial push you need for social media marketing.
6. Understand the psychology of potential customers
Knowing the psychology of the potential customers can be a great benefit for cost-effective marketing strategies. After all, the buying habits of customers are directed by their mental state. Being aware of where they are in the buyer’s journey as well as their mechanism of believing in things, following trends, daily habits, etc can be the cornerstones of developing effective strategies.
7. Create an offer/deal
Now you might have got some ideas for low budget marketing strategies. You have to be ready to do everything that is going to attract people (in a legal way). Creating offers/deals/discounts are other activities you can do for that.
8. Organize meetings
Organizing meeting is different than organizing events. Events can be of any field and you just push yourself to be there but meetings should be closely related to your field. For example, if you are a small dust mask producing industry, create a meeting calling experts in the field of health and pollution control. There you need to discuss some serious issue regarding the health of people and how you can improve it by improving the quality of masks. It helps you gain attraction from general people and experts as you seem so serious in your field.
9. Create unique and attractive benefit
The best way to penetrate the market is to be unique. Following the path of others simply puts you in the shadow and it’s always hard for you to get noticed. Creating unique and attractive benefits helps you in this. Even if your niche is not new in the market, creating unique and attractive benefits helps you get noticed among others. For example, you are an SEO Company and if you create an offer of free SEO analysis report for first-time customers, you might get too many contracts.
10. Value your customers for a good customer retention
The success rate of a company depends on how often its customers return back to it. The customer retention rate (the percentage of the customer returning back to purchase) really matters for small businesses because the targeted customers are nearly the same group inside a small location and their cyclic involvement is what generates the profit. So, to keep a high customer retention rate ( more than 90% is ideal), customers should be valued for their engagement. It’s the behavioral activities of business holders and it requires more of the soft skills (skills required to make good relationships with customers) than hard skills (core skills related to the field).
The low-budget marketing strategies for small business depends on how well you understand the trends in the market, competitors’ activities and the psychology of the customers. When you are going to compromise with the cost of marketing, the results will also be compromised. Finding an effective low-budget marketing strategy that actually works is hard but the right use of data, conscience and the result of a constant hit and trial method might ease your decision-making process.