Low-budget marketing is the dream of any business owner. But, of course, it includes increasing brand awareness and sales. Otherwise, what is the point of all these movements? Maybe you’ve heard an opinion that the marketer’s absolute professionalism brings the company to success with the minimum monetary investments.
So please read this article to find out whether it is possible and how to do it in the best possible ways.
The Main Thing is to Start
It’s strange but a fact that up to this day, some companies still don’t promote their business on the Internet. And this reason is that the owners avoid spending money on marketing. So here we have an interesting paradox. On the one hand, if the company has a stable income and a long existence in the market, it has no problem implementing SEO and other marketing services.
But, on the other hand, you can’t get a stable profit in a highly competitive environment without starting to invest in marketing. So, in general, it turns out to be a stalemate. However, the point is not to invest a lot of money in marketing but to take specific steps to develop a business on the web and not only do it as cheaply as possible. So the main thing is to start.
Easy Ways to Making Your Marketing Cheaper
The realities of the market are that not everyone has the budget to pay for expensive advertising campaigns.
To a greater extent, it applies to small businesses, where owners are not eager to part with money for advertising and other marketing communications. But there’s a way to kill two birds with one stone: to simultaneously conduct сheap marketing campaigns and build brand awareness. To do this, you need to use the methods described below.
# 1 Work with Existing Communities
A great strategy is to concentrate on building and growing a community around your site. However, if your budget is too limited, it’s better to refuse this idea. But if it doesn’t bother you, working with existing communities (forums, groups on social networks, and Q&A sites) will be a great marketing approach, subsequently positively impacting your business.
Of all this list, the most underestimated are forums, which, at the same time, often have the highest quality audience. You can find forums with tens and hundreds of thousands of visitors on popular topics. So if you do it right, you can attract to your brand an audience of the size you would gain for a few months.
# 2 Use the Potential of Aggregators
Today you can find them for most commercial requests, and their dominance is unquestionable in some niches (Booking.com). Such aggregators benefit from a clustered structure that allows you to get displays for multiple queries related to different business characteristics. So, for example, people can search for a company by its field of activity, location, or price category.
Aggregators generate appropriate landing pages for all these queries. Of course, a paid placement won’t always be justified, but you can add your company for free due to such resources. Moreover, it benefits everyone: you for apparent reasons and aggregators, since they enrich their database with the hands of users and save time for employees.
# 3 Develop Your Brand Social Networks
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks allow you to create a company page for free and attract a certain number of visitors even with a zero-based budget. However, all modern social networks have one common problem.
It’s a constant decline in opportunities for organic growth. The most striking example of this trend is Facebook, where you can do almost nothing without money for advertising. On the plus side, you can promote individual publications for as little as $1 and create a page for free.
And, of course, it’s impossible to say anything about YouTube, which is also a social network. Instead of text content and pictures, all the work is done with video. Of course, if you engage in this area seriously, everything will cost a lot. But even such simple things as a short video or product review can also provide its effect.
# 4 Take the Quantity
It doesn’t mean that you should save on quality. Instead, you can get good quality for little money due to buying advertising space. Unfortunately, it is often costly on popular sites and well-known bloggers. At the same time, placement on less promoted resources and opinion leaders with fewer subscribers can be even more effective, but you have to buy more placements. So why is it beneficial?
💰 You can start with smaller budgets;
💰 Advertising can be stretched over time, providing a constant occupancy info field;
💰 The level of trust and audience loyalty to such resources is often higher.
In addition to the blogs mentioned above, the list of such often underestimated resources includes regional media and narrow-niche platforms devoted to a specific subject. If you want a ready-made list of bloggers, influencers, and profitable posting sites, you can use Best Writers Online, where you’ll find an expert to do it for you.
# 5 Create an Email Marketing Plan
Unlike many other modern forms of online advertising, the mailing list provides direct contact with the audience, with no intermediaries. You may be aware of what audience usually receive such emails. These are people who are already interested in your products or services and who personally desire to receive information from your brand, unlike contextual advertising or remarketing. Any online store owner will tell you what a good return on investment you can get with promotional offers.
To start gathering your base for email marketing, you need to place particular subscription forms on your website, for example, by integrating them into the design or making them in a pop-up format. Costs for it will be minimal because most services for creating emails allow you to design the forms on your own, and from your side, you need to implement the received code on the website.
# 6 Experiment with Promotions and Discounts
This way of attracting an audience doesn’t belong to the list of freebies, but if you’re smart about it, such marketing activity can be cheap. First, you can offer discounts only on products you have a good margin on. It makes it possible to make the price reduction significant enough to attract the attention of buyers. A 2-3% discount may not interest many people, but 15-20% is quite another matter.
Well, secondly, you can formulate the terms of the special offer in such a way as to increase the average bill. Then a decent profit can be obtained through volumes, even with reducing margins on a single item. So, for example, offer a discount plus free shipping, but on purchases above a certain threshold amount. You can also pay attention to such marketing techniques as cross-selling and up-selling, which have proven themselves as tools to stimulate sales.
And finally, you can also use the method of gift certificates and loyalty programs. That is, make it so that the client wants to come to you again and brings someone else with him next time. Moreover, it also works with corporate clients. You need to ask and observe the customers what can stimulate them to such an action. Large cosmetic chains, fitness clubs, and mobile operators are great examples. Copy this perfectly working model and apply it to your business
In addition, if you have offices of any digital coupon provider in your region (like Groupon), or perhaps there’s a local company with this kind of work, ask them to plan the advertising campaign for your brand. You’ll not be charged for it, but you’ll see how much you can earn for one day of such a campaign with zero investment in coverage and attraction. The decision is yours.
# 7 Do Some Work Independently
There are two main ways to work when implementing an Internet marketing strategy. First, you can choose the one that suits you best regarding your business direction, goals, and budget.
- Delegate everything to contractors, controlling only the budget, coordinating work, and analyzing reports.
- Delegate only the most complex or specialized work to contractors, and do the rest of the tasks in-house (or on your own).
The second option is worth pursuing if the budget is limited, especially since there are more than enough such tasks. For example, technical work on the site, layout, design, and advertising campaigns, can engage an Internet marketing agency. But your team members can make the texts, photos, and videos. Often it also allows you to achieve a higher quality of the content at the output because experienced professionals do its creation.
# 8 Focus on the Website
Working on external factors such as getting backlinks or posting PR on other resources has always been expensive. But, at the same time, work on the site itself, fixing technical problems and other improvements of an internal nature, can bring more significant effect than any, even a very high-quality link mass. And it will cost many times cheaper. So, first of all, you can do the following actions:
✔️ Analyze the texts on all landing pages, increase their volume where they are not enough, and rewrite/structure where you can see room for improvement;
✔️ Refine Title/Description meta tags, improving their optimization for keywords and appeal to the user;
✔️ Conduct a technical audit and fix the bugs found;
✔️ Increase site performance and ensure it is optimized for mobile devices, etc.
If you want to learn more about free SEO techniques that bring more clients to your website, use Writing Judge, where you’ll get a top 3 writing services list. With it, you can find a qualified writer who will do informative research on any marketing topic.
# 9 Take Benefit of Press Releases and Publications
Make it a habit every Tuesday (or any other day) to issue press releases about your company’s activities. They shouldn’t be significant, so it’s best to do 1/2 a printed page of text plus a couple of critical sentences about the company. In addition, look for in-house infomercials throughout the week. Set up a system for gathering and processing news in the company.
After that, distribute your press releases diligently online and through all the communication channels available: the website, the corporate newspaper for customers, the newsletter, and the bulletin board on the sales floor. Register your press releases on free press release directories (easy to find on any search engine). Then, send your news to interested publications in your area: print newspapers, magazines, and online media.
The same goes for more capacity publications in the press: give journalists and media outlets free content. It can be in the format of interviews of leading specialists on your market, on some problems of your consumers, analytical reports, statistical data (many media love different statistical compilations), or just exciting publications related to your niche.
Suggest to the leading magazine in your region to organize and conduct some particular interesting column and supply your column with relevant and fresh information weekly. Remember that everyone needs exciting and helpful content. So it’s a good idea to ask your customers or potential customers what they are interested in about your topic and what they want to know.
#10 Be Helpful for Your Audience
It’s one of the main rules you should always consider when building any marketing strategy. So it closes our top list of the best ways to make your marketing cheaper. Consider that if your product is helpful to your customers, you don’t have to spend much money on marketing. Instead, people will come to you and buy your products and services themselves. So, how can you build trust with your customers? First, use the case-study method to show your target segments an example of how to solve their problems.
Then, write stories according to the formula “Problem – Solution – Result” and “How bad it was before, and how wonderful it became after.” Stories in this vein are very engaging for most people. However, only such texts should not be written in a dry and concise tone. Instead, your copywriter should write in simple language, as if telling it to a friend. And don’t make the aim of such “success stories” to sell your particular services, but only to share valuable information. Customer reviews are another very effective way to earn the trust of your audience.
Remember that you should collect customer feedback from when your company was still a startup, So try to establish great relationships with your clients and work on them. For instance, you can offer to express their opinions on your services or the same ones in the general market. It would help if you conducted surveys and used a call to action in your communications. Provoke your customers to respond to your messages, give them free tips and get their agreement to receive your marketing materials (only beneficial for them and not often).
Conclusion
Cheap marketing in work areas isn’t much different from large-scale and expensive campaigns. The difference is more in the approach: you must carefully analyze each step, observe your competitors and move in small steps. In this way, you can maximize the return on investment.
The whole process can be in the form of the following algorithm: do, analyze the results and make adjustments if necessary. It’s not complicated. The main thing is to start.
