Marketing plays a key role in the success of any business, and for any new business owner finding and implementing a low-cost marketing plan should be the first priority.
A low-cost marketing strategy has lesser risk and provides a greater opportunity to experiment more and for a longer duration. The best part is that it is pocket-friendly with a low impact on your budget for your business.
Most importantly if you are a start-up, different low-cost marketing strategies permit you to conduct competitive research, which in turn help you to understand your target customers better and also make more people aware of your products, services, and brand.
For new business owners, creating a marketing plan based on the marketing budget for small businesses becomes a challenging task sometimes. This further results in the creation of a poor and ineffective marketing strategy which directly impacts the sales and revenue of the business.
The current post, therefore, would discuss some amazing and effective ways to create killer marketing plans and low-budget marketing strategies for different business owners.
Blogging
For a small business, blogging is an excellent and cost effective tool to drive more customers and get more traffic to your business website. It is one of the cheapest marketing strategies from which you can get over 97% more links compared to your competitors whose websites do not have a blog section.
In addition, blogging allows you to tell your potential customers about your different products or services. Also, it is an interactive tool that allows potential customers to connect easily with you and share their opinions and thoughts on certain topics.
Thus, blogging helps establish credibility and in presenting your business as an expert in the domain. Your blog can eventually become the primary goto source for information regarding a specific topic or product or service.
Blogging increases the chances of ranking your business website among top search engine result pages or SERPs. Maintaining consistency in posting different blog posts on different topics that are directly related to your business would provide value to search engines, which would improve website ranking in SERPs.
Email Marketing
After blogging, email marketing is another low-budget marketing strategy to spread your brand awareness among a large group of your target customers. Connecting with people in a personalized manner helps in building strong and long-term customer relationships which indirectly increases your sales and revenue on a recurring basis.
Approximately 81% of small businesses report that email is a primary customer acquisition channel. The most amazing fact about implementing an email marketing strategy is that it is one of the cheapest marketing strategies. Yet, the effectiveness of an email marketing strategy is still enormous.
Using popular email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or MailerLite, you can slowly nurture your email subscribers until your target customers are ready to become your paying customers.
By creating different email campaigns, you can easily target different groups of your target customers, increasing your chances of getting more leads for your business.
You can share different tips, tricks, and tutorials, along with reasons why they would consider your products or services and what unique features or specialties your products or services have compared to your peers.
There is no doubt that email marketing fits the marketing budget for small businesses perfectly.
Social Media
In the post-pandemic era, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools to promote your business products or services. No matter what budget is set for your marketing campaign, including social media in your marketing plan is what would translate it into a killer marketing plan for your brand or business.
9 out of every 10 people are social media users, which makes social media a large platform for different business owners, irrespective of their size, whether a startup or a large established brand, to promote their products or services.
You might wonder if social media marketing would cost a lot of money as it has a huge user base. But in reality, social media marketing is one of the best low-cost marketing strategies that offers great results for your business.
There are several social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, and many more, each of which have a different user base. Using the right channel based on your target audience can easily spread your brand awareness and promote your business products and services without spending a single penny.
Sounds amazing, right? So, consider social media to convert your ordinary marketing plan into a killer marketing plan on a small budget in no time.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing might sound like a very expensive or a complex term, but it is one of the inexpensive marketing ideas you should use for small businesses.
In the market, there lies a big myth that influencer marketing requires an enormous budget because hiring influencers is expensive. A good number of influencers charge a lot of money to promote your brand’s products or services.
Still when you focus on a targeted niche, you can easily do influencer marketing at a low cost, making it a low-cost marketing strategy for your small business. The cost of hiring or collaborating with influencers depends upon many factors, including follower count and partnership terms and the goals or objectives you want to achieve with the help of influencer marketing.
By considering different factors, having a clear idea, and focusing on any particular niche for marketing your business, you can easily fit influencer marketing into your low-budget marketing strategies.
Search Engine Optimization
People seldom click on and explore beyond the first few search results. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO is a long-term marketing strategy which not only ranks your business website among top search engine result pages but also helps you to build authority and trust among your target customers or prospects.
Building high authority websites helps you stand out among your competitors, which is what SEO does. SEO is highly cost-effective and a low-cost marketing strategy implementation which would build your brand in the online world and contribute to the development of your brand in the long run.
Before implementing SEO, you need to have a basic knowledge about it, how it works and how you can use it to generate organic traffic. In the beginning, SEO may seem like a very complex and a difficult topic, but with practice, it is easy to understand and implement.
For acquiring basic SEO knowledge, there are various trusted resources like our Blogs, Hubspot Academy, Google Digital Garage, and many others. You can use them free of cost to gain a fundamental idea about SEO and then implement it in your marketing plan.
Final Words
As a small business owner with a limited budget for branding and promotion, it becomes even more important to smartly implement low-cost marketing strategies in order to increase your brand awareness and build trust amongst your target customers, so that you may increase your sales and revenue for your business.
Based on your business needs, goals and objectives, you can implement any or all of the above-mentioned marketing strategies for your business.