Starting a business comes with many challenges. The biggest challenge is financing. While marketing is a crucial element for success, you may not have all the funds to invest in heavy marketing. Did you know it’s possible to market your business even if you are on a budget? Some of the marketing techniques are free or have little expenses.
Below are best marketing techniques that won’t break your bank.
- Be a confident social networker
Building connections and networking with others is crucial for the success of your business. Every successful business was once a start-up. The social media has made it easy to build solid connections with similar brands.
Make use of social media pages like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, among others. It’s possible to connect with other businesses on Facebook by searching the groups using the Facebook search bar.
Join the groups and find out what other businesses like you are doing. Connecting with them will help you get tips on where they get their clients.
You can also create a Facebook page and invite your friends to like it. Create Facebook ads targeting your audience depending on where they are located. Facebook gives you an option of selecting the kind of people you want your post to reach.
- Host a class or an event
Plan an event in your business where you can welcome other investors and business owners. While your event may have other objectives that might interest other investors, your aim should be to market your business.
In this case, you could create printed materials about your business. For example, you can summarize all the information about your business in small booklets and print it out.
You shouldn’t miss other marketing materials like a business card, flyers, and notebooks. Ensure that your printed marketing materials are attractive and brief in content.
- Email marketing
Would you like to make long-lasting relationships with your customers? Email marketing is excellent because no one controls your email.
It’s even much better than social media marketing. Social media platforms have, and posts go down to the newsfeed with time.
If you rely on other groups to market your services, you may lose clients once those groups are archived. But email marketing is different. You own your audience and can talk to them anytime without restrictions.
All you need is to have a reasonable number of subscribers before starting to send emails. The best way of getting subscribers is creating a freebie.
You can have a form on your website where people fill their contact details in exchange of your freebie. That is what most marketers do to get email subscribers. Use free email marketing services like mail chimp on your email campaigns.
- Publish content regularly
How often do you publish content on your website? I wouldn’t want to miss saying that you should publish kick-ass content in your site. When you publish meaningful content, your audience tends to share it when they find it useful.
Popular bloggers like Neil Patel gained a huge following through content marketing. His blog posts get more than 1k shares which is a great marketing outcome.
If you don’t have a knack of writing, you can hire a professional copywriter to help you in writing copy for your site. Posting meaningful content regularly improves your site’s ranking.
You should create a content calendar for your site with topics to cover each week. Check the latest content ideas from forums like Quora in your niche.
- Referral Programs
It doesn’t matter whether you have an offline business or an online business. Referral programs work on both types of businesses. However, this will depend with your existing customers.
Offer discounts to customers who bring other customers to your business. Besides that, you can create a referral program and have a system that enables you to verify purchases before giving out a reward if you have an online business.
Another point on this is to create an affiliate program on your site. Some marketers are constantly looking for affiliate programs to help them earn some bucks.
You can include it on your products as well and offer a small commission for every sale.
- Guest posting
Did you know that you can hijack someone’s platform to make their audience aware about your business? That can happen through guest posting.
Guest posting involves posting content one someone else’s website and including a link back to your block. Most websites have guest posting guidelines that you need to follow to get published. Look for websites in your niche that are looking for guest bloggers.
Write great content and include a link to your blog. If the content captivates the readers of that site, they will visit your blog to know more about your products and services.
- Make use of Google My Business
Google My Business is a crucial tool having local customer base and businesses use. Once customers search for a service or product in your area, your product may appear on top of the search engine. When they view your business profile, they will come and purchase it.
- Experimental marketing
If you would like to attract customers, have a product testing session to your potential customers. Offer it for free and let them express their views on what they think about it. This tactic needs proper planning.
You don’t have to test many people. Since you are a start-up, you can test a few customers. Experiential marketing aims to raise awareness about your product. No matter how few they are, they will come to buy from you and bring more clients.
The aim of marketing a business is to create awareness about the existence of your product or service. There are many inexpensive marketing techniques you can use. Whether you want to market online or offline, all you need is consistency and working smart to succeed. Social media and search engines should be one of the first techniques you should be thinking about.
Related posts:
