Low Budget Marketing Ideas for Your Small Business

Posted by Tanya on September 30th, 2019

You must invest a certain amount of your funds to reach out to your target consumers. But if you have a limited budget to promote your business, the following tips and ideas will enable you to get the best return on marketing investment. 

1. Ask for Referrals

One of the easy and affordable ways to promote your business is to turn your satisfied customers into your business marketers. Remember that people are more likely to purchase a product from you when it is referred to them by their friends. No matter how many technical reviews are published online, people still rely heavily on personal recommendations.

That's why well-established businesses still rely heavily on customer reviews and ratings on Google and other well-known sites. Starting a referral program is easy and it can also be totally free. You can reward your customers with a discount or cash for each new customer they bring to your business. Just make sure you inform them early so they can get excited and start marketing your business for you immediately.

2. Create an Attractive Brochure

A brochure is a small magazine or book that contains photos and information on a product or service. Brochures are powerful sales tools. They allow you to have something tangible to hand over to your prospect when you are talking about your products and services. You can also send out well-printed foldable brochures to advertise your business through direct marketing. In recent times, direct marketing has provided higher response rates than most online marketing channels.

3. Give free seminars

People love to learn new things and find solutions to the problems they are having. So you can offer a free workshop or class that is directly related to your product or service. To make free seminars effective, you need to know all the benefits that your product offers. Then use the most important benefit to promote your free seminar.

For instance, if you have a business that offers financial benefits, you can offer a seminar titled "How to earn an extra 0 monthly without leaving your current job". Then you can weave in details about how your product or service will help your participants to earn additional income, you will also be able to capture a large number of leads that you can follow up after the seminar.

4. Create a business website

Get an affordable and reliable web designer to create a professionally designed website for your business. Let it provide basic information about your products/services and all the benefits they offer to your prospects. You should also make sure it has keywords that will make it come up in local searches on Google. Add a blog to the website and add new content to it at least once every two weeks. You may mix informational articles with news articles about events in your company or industry.

5. Be a Guest on Radio

Radio is still a powerful mass media platform for reaching a large audience at once. If your business appeals to a mass-market or you can identify popular radio programs that your target audience will love, you can be a guest on such programs. Many radio stations will be willing to host you and allow you to talk for a few minutes about your business for a relatively low advert fee.

6. Form partnerships with other businesses

To reduce the cost of marketing and increase your reach, you can partner with other businesses and do cross-promotion. This is an excellent way to reduce the cost of adverts and build up business relationships that will help all partners. Examples of cross-promotions include combined or bundled offerings and joint media appearances. This may also involve collaborative effort to create marketing e-books, white papers, videos or co-branding.

7. Use LinkedIn to Promote Your Business

LinkedIn is a great place to promote your small business because about half of the members can take key decisions in their companies. There are also more than 65 million business professionals from different parts of the world on this platform. To get the best results from LinkedIn marketing, you need to post frequent status updates and participate in groups that are closely related to your business.

Those are some of the ideas you can use to create an affordable, low-cost marketing plan for your business. They will help you to achieve your goal of promoting your business effectively on a low budget.