Top Tips for Marketing Your Small Business on a Budget
If you’re a small business owner, the likelihood is that you’re running everything on a budget and money isn’t available in abundance either. Well, if you are a small business owner you’ll also know that marketing your business is also vitally important to your growth. If you’ve ever been against spending money on that side of your business, then you should know that growth without promotion or marketing is unlikely. It’s a bit of a catch 22.
Create Local Awareness
This is something that can help massively, depending obviously what industry you’re in because in some instances, being known locally won’t help you. However, if you’re looking for good forms of local financial services marketing, local promotion for your coffee shop, local promotion of your local web agency then creating some local awareness is a sure-fire way to help generate some business and help your promotion.
Getting coverage in the local papers, relevant trade magazines and on relevant niche related websites can help to improve your name and recognition and, it can help to educate people about your business and the services that you offer. Alright, it’s potentially something that’s a bit pricey but it could prove massively fruitful in the long run.
Research Your Market
This is something that costs you absolutely zero. Of course, you may need an internet connection to do all of this research work properly. If you don’t have one, it may be a good idea to get in touch with internet providers indianapolis (or wherever you’re based) and get a stable and reliable internet connection. And once it’s done, you should spend time identifying your target markets and characteristics that would describe your ideal buyer types and with this information, you’ll be able to focus your marketing efforts more precisely and you can tailor your marketing messages to attract and engage more likely buyers.
On top of this you should definitely check out your competitors and look into what they’re doing that you’re not. Try to identify opportunities where you can one-up them and beat them but don’t go head to head in areas that they’re clearly stronger in as this is likely to result in a loss but, if you spend the time looking into areas that they’re weak, you can find areas that can be exploited and will also give your business the best chance to grow.
Utilise Email Marketing
This is something that will cost you nothing more than time. Email marketing is a great, effective way of marketing your business and it also delivers an incredibly good ROI. If you have an email list of 500 customers, you’ve got a ready-made list of people to reach out to who have either shown an interest in buying from you or have bought from you in the past. It means you are more likely going to get recognition or interest and draw people into your business. There are plenty of different ways to do email marketing too – you can go to sites like https://www.epsilon.com/us/products-and-services/epsilon-peoplecloud/data-platforms/prospect to find out more about the strategy.
A company newsletter is a great way of keeping these potential customers engaged with your business and your brand. If you have any special offers on, this is a great way to promote them and try to get some extra business in.
Collaborate
This is something that I suspect many business owners when reading it on the surface, would be massively against. But, it doesn’t have to be a collaboration with your competition. In fact, quite the opposite. If you spend a bit of time and put together a list of local, synergistic and (most importantly) non-competitive businesses in your area and reach out to them about cross-promoting.
Using things like coupons, fliers, reciprocal links on your websites and promotion across your social media channels can massively help you both out. By collaborating with each other, you can both expand your network and your customer base because you’ll both be reaching out to new people.
