Marketing your business is among the most essential and challenging parts of operating a small business. Most business owners have zero marketing background and often don’t have the required resources to afford the talent to make a difference in the space, especially when you’re starting. If you can’t promote the business efficiently, it might cost you. Fragile marketing can restrict your exposure to new customers and make you endangered to the more market-savvy competition.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t need to be this way. Even if your company doesn’t have big resources, you can still get your message out and raise brand awareness. Below are 7 ways of marketing your business on a shoe-string budget.
Let’s dive right in:
1. Publish Amazing Blog Content
Your blog serves as the bedrock of all your marketing moves. It’s where you pump visitors, build and nurture relationships and generate leads. Make sure you put out regular content that meets the interests and needs of the audience.
Creating amazing online content comes with many benefits. All businesses, including nonprofits, pursue this strategy. Because it’s a simple, foolproof technique. Quality content helps readers better understand your products / services and attracts visitors.
Similar to social networks, effective content marketing is offering useful, interesting content — regularly. This ensures people read your writing as well as come across it.
2. Launch a Podcast
Perhaps you’re one of the fortunate people who like their own voice. Or maybe some staff can speak well. If so, then podcasting should be your staple. Podcasts are excellent for raising brand awareness while humanizing your business. The human voice is also more authentic, more connecting, and more humanizing than any social network. If you can execute well, then a podcast can be a powerful marketing weapon.
3. Use Social Networks Strategically
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, so on and so forth. Agreed – social media marketing can be quite overwhelming. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Successful social media marketing begins with understanding your exact target audience and creating a content plan to heighten your influence and reach.
Billions of people use social networks. And accessing them is completely free. So building a social media presence is the top and most cost-effective technique to get new customers / clients and keep contact with existing ones. If you use it properly, it can be a rock-solid marketing weapon for a small business.
There are a few fundamental social media marketing rules. First, you must create quality content, meaning your target audience must want to see it. It must also be up-to-date, meaning you must update your social network profiles regularly. Your brand Facebook page isn’t useful in the least if the last time you posted something was 2 years ago.
You must also be consistent on your social networking platforms. Link out to content others provide or create, particularly if it’s in your related niche. This way, you can grow your social presence in the long run, and it’ll let you reach more prospects.
Lastly, your social presence must build a community. Your company must engage with customers / clients and prospects and build an atmosphere where they conversate with each other. If your social presence turns into a place where people come to engage with each other, you’ll be building brand awareness that you just can’t purchase.
4. Make Your Customers Your Sales Force
This simply means to encourage your customers to send you referrals. There are tons of businesses that run just based on referrals. After all, people like to hear from their close peers about new products / services they need.
To win referrals, first, you must impress your current customers / clients with your product / service. Second, organize a referral program where you offer a percentage share to someone sending your business. Such strategic partnerships can keep you busy for years.
5. Pursue Guest Posting and Article Marketing
New marketing strategies often create a blog to put out fantastic content that explains the main features of their product / service. However, it’s hard to build traction if you’re just getting started. And that’s the problem for most businesses.
In such cases — guest posting or article marketing can help you. Similar to all budget-friendly marketing, it helps if you’re strategic. Find relevant blogs that accept guest posts and pitch them topics. Over time, as those blogs grow, their backlinks get stronger and help you rank better on Google.
6. Pay Per Click and Social Advertising
PPC ads are worth it because there’s no need to spend a dime unless it’s generating your clicks from real people. Plus, you can get started with a small budget as well. Using Google Adwords, you bid on specific keywords relating to the business and get charged a minimal cost whenever someone clicks on the ad.
While social media advertising is more recent, it’s super powerful too. On social platforms, you can reach a larger and more targeted audience with paid ads. Similar to PPC advertisement, such campaigns are scalable too. No matter how small your budget is, you can start your business.
7. Hire an Experienced Business Coach
When you’re starting out, the marketing world can overwhelm you. That’s why you need a successful coach to hand-hold you through the process. The marketing world is moving fast and becoming more competitive. Thus, it’s hard to keep pace with both the changes — in your industry and innovations in marketing, sales, and management strategies.
Having an experienced coach isn’t a luxury. It’s a must-have for your business. Accountability is a fantastic upside of working with a coach. It’s tough to give an objective answer to yourself regarding your business, but the business coach will tell you the tough truths, no matter how much you resist it.
Coaches are better than consultants. Thanks to their years of quality experience, business coaches can offer precious insights that’ll help develop short-term and long-term goals and strategies. It’ll also help better the business in places where you might’ve missed out on.
Closing Thoughts
Without a rock-solid marketing strategy, your business might never be fruitful. That said, there’s no need to blow a fortune to build brand awareness. Brands with a very modest budget can execute outstanding marketing campaigns too. The 7 techniques above are all winners. So take a few of them and go all in.
And lastly, here at Simba 7 Media, we’ve been helping businesses grow since 2008. If you’re also a new business owner, feel free to check out our value media packages, which can do wonders for your business.
