Ideas for Marketing your Business on a Budget

Marketing your business on a budget

Marketing your business is essential but it can take a huge chunk out of your budget. If people don’t know about you and what you can do for them, then you’re going to find that customers become very hard to attract. Good marketing can improve your company’s profile, but it doesn’t need to involve bundles of cash – some smart use of your time can reap rewards without having to dig too deep into your cash reserves.

How to market your business on a budget

There are lots and lots of articles out there with some ideas of how you can market your business on a shoestring budget. None contain ‘magic bullet’ answers, and all involve some time commitment on your part; if there’s a way of reaching oodles of potential customers without using any time or money at all, then please could someone point me in the right direction!

There are, however, some things which will be a better use of your time than others, and while a lot will depend exactly on what you do and on who your target market is, there are some techniques which can be applied universally.

Have a look at these articles I’ve found with some brilliant ideas for marketing your business on a budget.

As with many marketing techniques today, there is an emphasis on digital marketing – such as creating a blog, setting up a Facebook group, and taking advantage of free email marketing software. Yes, these things are all free to you, but don’t underestimate the time involved in creating good content for your blog, or building up an email list. They don’t happen by magic.

Creating a free ebook is a great tip – you can use it as a hook to get people to sign up to your mailing list, or joining your social media groups. Just don’t give too much away – you need to offer valuable advice without putting yourself out of a job by giving away trade secrets, and it can be a fine line to tread!

Again, lots of these tips tend towards using free online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube but there are some great offline marketing ideas. I do like the one about nominating yourself for a business award. Some business awards are just a ploy to sell tickets to a snazzy awards dinner, but some can be genuinely meaningful. Look out for ones which are free to enter, and where the award ceremony is free to attend.

Saying that, even if you have to pay to attend, it can be great value for money if you can use even being nominated for an award to get yourself in the trade press, a local newspaper, or as a guest on a radio station. For good PR, you always need something interesting to talk about, and awards, whether you win or not, are a great excuse for getting yourself out there that little bit more.

Inevitably, one of their ideas is to run a webinar or workshop where you can share knowledge with people interested in your business. The advantage of running an event which requires a commitment from someone to attend is that you will have at least an audience of interested people who will likely be decision-makers to some level in their organisation. Yes, it will cost you some money to run and promote, and yes you might not get huge numbers attending, but those that do will be high-quality prospects. It’s worth thinking about if you have a time window where you could put on something which is genuinely insightful and useful to your target market.

Marketing your business

Photo by Paul Bence on Unsplash

Amongst the suggestions to take advantage of free digital platforms, there is a great tip about teaming up with complementary businesses to do cross-promotion. Find a business which operates in your target market but isn’t a direct competitor and find ways in which to promote each other – for example by putting an advert for each other on your respective websites, or swapping leaflets to leave in each other’s shops, or offering a discount to each other’s customers.

Marketing your business costs

The other state of mind is to look at marketing and advertising spend as an inevitable part of your business model, suck it up, pay a professional for a job well-done, and free your time up to do something that uses your specific skills better. We all have our talents, and if marketing isn’t your personal forte, then it could be wiser to use your limited resources to get the job done properly and reap the rewards faster.

Have you got any good ideas for low-cost, effective marketing?

Did you know? Marketing and advertising is just one of the areas of your business where we can review and reduce your costs. Get in touch if we can help your business improve its profitability.

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