Are you looking to promote your small business but lack a budget? If yes, you are in the right place. Here in this article, we list the best low-cost marketing strategies that will enhance your sales and brand growth.
Reaching out to the right customer is really important in business nowadays. You can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing without any effective results. To help your business reach out to the right customers, you need to pick up the right marketing plan. With digital media and proper marketing strategies, now it makes it easy to use alternative marketing methods to achieve growth at lower costs.
Even if you are tight on your budget, never give marketing or advertising a miss. As a matter of fact, good marketing strategies help you to boost the business’s growth by widening your prospects.
10 Low-Cost Marketing Strategies
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the most popular online marketing platforms when it comes to brand visibility and presence. With so many platforms and interfaces, it makes it really easy to target new customers through social media marketing. All you need to have is interactive content and daily engagement. Make sure you are active on all your platforms, reach out to all the individuals, and stay connected.
2. Cross Promotion
A very effective way to market each others’ products, cross-promotion helps you to promote your business without any cost. Generally, businesses complementary to each other use cross-promotion to promote each other’s businesses. Cross-promoting will allow you to collaborate with other related businesses that will market your services, and in exchange, you will market theirs’.
3. Referral Program
The referral program is a very effective low-cost marketing strategy for small businesses to increase customers. It allows you to multiply your user base without investing anything. This is an organic way of marketing where one can set up a program, put out the word, and grow on their own. Affiliate programs are generally advised to businesses that offer services and products in the B2C category.
4. Local Events
The local community events help you to gain exposure and create brand awareness. A low-cost method of marketing a business, organizing local events will allow you to build your reputation. Even if you are tight on your budget, you can be a sponsor for the event or have a kiosk at the venue. Such events help you to promote your business to get a wider reach.
5. Email Marketing
Many consider it an outdated method of marketing, but email marketing is still an effective way of low-cost advertising. With a good set of data, this low-cost marketing strategy can help you to bond and connect with your audience. If not conversions, you can at least maintain a good rapport with your customers with timely greetings and messages. It will help to maintain a connection and you don’t have to shell out much.
6. Content Marketing
Also known as inbound marketing, this method is very effective when it comes to influencing buying behavior. Content marketing will help you to reach out to newer segments of the audience. You need to have a very strategic approach to creating your content and the distribution has to be appropriate. Relevant and consistent content will allow you to gain and retain a clearly defined user base.
7. Reviews & User-Generated Content
Most buyers check reviews before going for a particular service or product. Surveys say that positive user reviews have 60 percent more efficient to prompt a sale than advertising. If your product or service is being accepted on a positive note, it will motivate other customers at the same time. Tell your existing customers and fans to write a review or share a little story about their experience.
8. Boost Up Your Online Presence
For all small businesses, the optimum use of the online space is going to play a key role in the success of small businesses. Thousands of prospective customers are waiting for you online and all you need to offer is high-quality content.
Having a blog is a must for small businesses. Well-written blogs, interesting articles, and videos will help you to gain new customers. Make sure you have a well-designed website with the latest updates and offers.
9. SMS Marketing
We still see a message and read it carefully even if it’s from a company or some advertisement. SMS marketing is a direct way to communicate with your target audience. The conversion rates are high and at the same time, you are keeping up with your existing customers. Make sure you don’t overspend on your SMS marketing. Repeated texts will annoy your users and they may block or unsubscribe from your services.
10. Personal Branding
Personal branding may sound more corporate and standardized, but one can do this as an individual as well. It involves self-promotion across digital platforms or maintaining a separate blog for business. You can use personal branding to syndicate your content by attracting new customers without investing anything.
You may be cutting down your budget in marketing and advertising, but never ever compromise on your quality. If you are tight on budget, try these low-cost marketing tools to attract new customers.
Editorial Team at 99BusinessIdeas is a team of experts led by Rupak Chakrabarty with over 25 years of experience in starting and running small businesses. Started in 2010, 99BusinessIdeas is now one of the largest free small business resources in the industry.
