Creative Ways To Market Your Business With A Low Marketing Budget

As a marketer, you often crib and get frustrated about the shortening consumer attention spans and the squeezing, tiny little marketing budget both of which you can’t do anything about.

Trust me, you’re not alone.

Most marketers struggle to showcase their business. There is shit loads of content out there, and most of your audience have rock bottom attention spans.

It’s really hard when you have a few seconds and a few dollars to get your business noticed.

Don’t worry, like every other cloud; this one has a silver lining too.

The good news is that while you are marketing your small business with a scanty budget, you can break the clutter and stand out from the competition.

Thankfully, there are some amazingly creative and inexpensive marketing ideas for a small business that you can use, for getting your business noticed.

Well, yes and you can effectively use these hacks to build an online reputation for your business and get consistent leads and conversions too!

Presenting the creative marketing ideas for small businesses with low marketing budgets.

Do Market Research

Remember, good marketing always begins with research. The good thing is that you don’t have to spend a dime to do market research.

The basic aspect of marketing any product or service, whether it's in the animal food market, IT services, or any other industry, is understanding the promotional activities and strategies of your key competitors.

Make a list of your competitors first. The next step is to check out their website and social media channels. Figure out if they have a blog or not.

Are they posting on their blog and social media channels regularly? What are some of the online channels where they have the highest number of fans and followers?

What is it that’s getting them the numbers on that channel? Are your competitors using video to promote their business?You need to also figure out the online channels where your target audience is most active.

All of these details will help you to come up with a strategy that’s within your limited marketing budget.

And here are the hacks:

1. Subscribe to the email newsletter of all of your competitors. This way you will get the content ideas they are working on.
2. Keep visiting your competitor's websites on a regular basis. This way you will be added to their remarketing lists and will be seeing your competitors display ads on the sites you visit.

Create a Social Media Presence

Once you know which marketing platform is best for your business, you can start promoting your website and its content on that channel.

You can easily create a free business page on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.  

You can start creating posts that your target audience would resonate with and enjoy.

It is essential to share your blog posts and videos on all of these channels.

You can also use social media channels to run paid campaigns that can promote your content and collect leads for your business.

Paid promotions on social media channels can be started with a minimal budget. You could start with a budget which is as low as just $5.

Once you start building a community of fans and followers on social, you will start noticing an increase in website traffic from these channels.

With consistent efforts, you will start getting quality leads for your business.

Take a look at this example from Property Minder:

PropertyMinder a web service firm that specializes in solutions for real estate agencies ran a Facebook campaign that offered a “Free Download” of white paper.

The results:
327 new fans
584 downloads (leads) of the whitepaper

Here are some very easy hacks you can try on social media:

1. Use your smartphone to go live on your Facebook business page. You could have a roundtable discussion with the team and publish it live on Facebook. This requires absolutely no budget, and you can create some really exciting content for your customers.
2. What’s more, you can invite your customers to go live from your Facebook page. They can do this from their existing location, while you can get some free content. This can be a great marketing idea for small business and FB Live is a new feature, and your competitors may not be using this till now.

Run A Social Media Contest

Interactive content formats like contests and quizzes are a rage in today’s times. Contests help your target audience to engage with your brand and help you to create buzz around your campaign.

You can create and promote social media contests quickly and cost-effectively. Contest campaigns make your content more shareable and help you to build a community around your brand.

You can create a variety of contests:

1. Photo Contests
2. Personality quizzes
3. Knowledge tests
4. Fun trivia contests

Contests are an entertaining content format, to help your business get more traction and some high-quality leads.

Here are some simple hacks:

1. You can use tools like Rafflecopter, Gleam and Woobox to create some amazing contests on social media channels.
2. Wish to create a simple contest? Just use the Facebook events feature to create a quick contest and get your fans to participate.

Take a look at this clever example of a Facebook contest:

Guest Blogging

The best way to get free PR for your business is to approach high domain authority websites for guest blogging. You can create a list of websites that publish high-quality content on a regular basis.

The next step is to pitch them with story ideas that would be a good fit for their audience.

Once your pitch gets approved, you can get your original articles published on these sites.

A guest blogging strategy will help you to:

1. Reach a bigger and relevant audience for your business
2. Create quality backlinks to improve your search engine rankings

Some inexpensive marketing ideas for small business:

1. You can use a simple tool like Open Site Explorer to find the backlinks of your competitors. The sites which have your competitor’s backlinks are the ones you can start targeting first.
2. You can use the free version of Followerwonk to find influencers in your industry. Type in their names on Google and make a list of sites where they have an authorship. The list can add to your target guest blogging list.

Video Marketing

The next big opportunity in content marketing is to create videos to educate and entertain your target audience.

You can start absolutely free by creating videos using your phone or the free editing tool from YouTube.

Videos combine visuals, graphics, and music all adding life to your content and help you to come across as a professional producer of products and services.

When you have some budget for video marketing, you can scale up and create a variety of video types to lure your target audience, to visit your website and social media channels on a regular basis.

Some of the video types include:

1. Introductory videos
2. Explainer videos
3. Product demo videos
4. Tutorial videos
5. Educational videos
6. Testimonial videos
7. Company culture videos

Besides these videos, you can convert existing blog posts and presentations into videos and put them up on your YouTube channel.

There are a variety of video formats you choose from:

1. Animated videos
2. Whiteboard videos
3. 3D Animation videos
4. Cartoon Animation videos
5. Live action videos

The type and format of video you are going to use would depend on your campaign objectives, the nature of your business and the type of audience you are targeting.

You must ensure that you are promoting your marketing videos through social media channels and email marketing.

The six-second YouTube bumper ads are also a very cost-effective way to start promoting your video to your audience on YouTube.

To create quality videos for your business, you must hire a professional video production services company.

Here is an innovative idea for a small business to start with video marketing quickly and effectively:

1. You can use a free tool like Canva to create images for your video.
2. You can simply add these images to the free YouTube video editor to create a slideshow video for your business.
   

Search Engine Optimisation

This is another cost-effective technique to promote your business online. Search engine optimisation helps you to rank on top of the search engine results organically.

This means that whenever someone from your target audience would type search queries related to your products/services, then your site would be visible among the top results on Google.

You can optimise your website by adding relevant keywords to its content and ensuring that its content and user-interface are user-friendly.

Besides that, you must ensure that your website is free from technical errors, loads faster and works on the mobile device.

You must also ensure that you are creating quality content and adding authority backlinks to your website, consistently.

Simple SEO hacks:

1. Use free tools like SeoSiteCheckup, Google Search Console, Google Page Speed Insights and Google Mobile-Friendly to ensure that your site is in shape.
2. If you write some really attractive meta tags, you will be able to shoot up the Click Through Rate of your website.  Take a look at this example:

Provide Great Customer Service

Good service is good business. - Siebel Ad

CEOs of successful companies like Amazon have been known answer customer queries personally. Great companies always put customers first.

Good marketing, besides, promoting products and services, must ensure that it’s empathetic towards the existing customers of the business.

Remember, if your customers are happy with you they will not just stay you for longer, but they will also talk about your services with their peers.

Keeping your customers happy is the best way to get free publicity.  It adds to your reputation among new prospects and customers.

Make sure your customers are not facing any problems with your products and services.

Here are some simple hacks for providing improved service for your customers:

1. Add a toll-free number to your site so your customers can connect with you anytime they have an issue.
2. You can add a live chat feature on your site. There are some cool free live chat tools that you can use. Try out tools like JivoChat and Drift.

Create a Newsletter

While marketing your business, it is not just important to get quality leads but to nurture them as well.

An email newsletter helps you to stay in touch with your prospects and engage with them.

It helps you to personalize your marketing efforts by understanding the preferences of your prospects.

You can use a low-cost tool like MailChimp or Zoho campaigns to create and send newsletters for your business.

There are different types of mailers that you can send to your contact list:

1. Product promotions
2. Blog posts, videos, and ebooks
3. News and updates about your business
4. Awards and achievements
5. Client case studies

A newsletter is a helpful technique to move your prospects down the sales funnel and finally convert. It is also helpful in getting your existing customers to make a repeat purchase and add to your revenue.

Take a look at this hilarious example from Buzzfeed:

Adding a little bit of humor can be amazing to build a relationship with your audience.

While marketing your products and services, you must ensure that you are not putting all eggs in one basket.

A scanty budget should not stop you from always trying something new and reaching out to your customers creatively and cost-effectively.

Be it paid promotions on social media or creating a video or producing an ebook, make sure you are telling your brand story in a way that nobody else is doing.

Always be on the lookout for new tools and techniques that can help you lower your costs and improve the ROI.

Make sure your website is optimised and has got an impressive introductory video of your business.

It is the best way to create that amazing first impression on your target audience.

Don’t forget to ensure that your customers are happy and they will surely come back for more.

We leave you with some cost-effective and free tools to help you execute some creative marketing campaign ideas: