6 Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses On a Limited Budget

Owning and working for your small business enterprise means having to handle multiple responsibilities, like product development, sales and marketing. Chances are, product development is your top priority, as it should be, because if your product isn’t any good, who would be interested in it?

But the following is also true: you’ve spent months, maybe even years preparing your perfecting your product. It’s time for the big launch. There’s only one problem, you don’t have a plan, nor the following to get your product under anyone’s radar.

Which is why marketing is necessary, and in this blog post, we’ll walk you through building your brand and reaching the people who are most likely to take interest in what you have to offer. Here are 6 cost effective strategies you can use to achieve unparalleled growth of your business.

Use e-Flyers To Hype Up Your Business

While traditional flyers are lightweight, easy-to-design and cost-effective – e-flyers are even better since they don’t need to be printed. This gives you the added advantage of saving on print costs, as well as appearing more environmentally friendly to potential customers from your target market.

According to a research study published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 2018, both print and online flyers have a similar effect on purchase behavior and memory. This means that the e-flyers will work just as well as traditional flyers, minus the cost.

You can make e-flyers using online tools like PosterMyWall – it has a minimal learning curve and makes it easy to design your flyers the way you like them. You can find thousands of professional-looking templates that you can customize as you see fit and even add your own logo.

When you’re creating flyers to promote your business, work on the copy and design style. You need to keep in mind the following:

  1. Make them easy to read – use a maximum of two fonts
  2. Separate the leaflets into heading and body copy
  3. Have something interesting and relevant to say
  4. Make sure the pictures, headlines and text align properly
  5. Using these online flyers on your website and in emails helps you target your audience with the right message about your business.

Include a CTA that links back to your website with the latest discounts or special offers you have. Create a sense of urgency and exclusivity in your promotions – include your number and email address when designing your e-flyer, so they can get in touch with you.

Easily design your e-flyer, using professionally designed templates with PosterMyWall. It’s super light on your wallet, costing only $2.99 for a high resolution download. PosterMyWall also offers free downloads for social media images. And speaking of social media images…

It’s Time to Take Social Media Seriously

These days, everyone’s on social media. According to research by Smartinsights, there are now about 3.96 billion active social media users worldwide, which is roughly half the world’s population! That means, no matter how niche your product or service is, there’s bound to be an audience that will be interested in it.

If done right, using social media can help you generate greater brand awareness amongst your audience and increase inbound traffic to your website. It also gives your customers a platform to engage directly with your brand content and helps you to deal with customer concerns, increase customer satisfaction and build loyalty. And not to mention, it’s one area that small businesses can compete in with big corporations without draining their budget.

Start by setting up profiles on all social media platforms that are relevant to your business. A restaurant might want to primarily target Facebook and Instagram, for example, because that’s where people go to look for food options.

Next, start creating eye-catching and interesting content to attract people and post as much as and as regularly as you can. Your posts are likely to perform better if you add a relevant image or video to it. In fact, 60 percent of people are more likely to click on a business that has images showing up in search results than one that does not. You want to create social media content with a tool that’s light on your budget and also provides results. PosterMyWall is one such option, that allows you to create all kinds of image and video content for your social media profiles.

Use Your Email List To Get The Word Out

Small businesses can’t afford to lose time with promotional strategies that won’t sit well with the target audience.

While social media is a useful and cost-effective way to establish communications, sometimes it lacks the organic reach that small businesses are looking for. Luckily, email marketing is still alive and kicking – providing you with a direct channel to reach out to leads and customers.

Email works well as a form of permission marketing where you ask users for their email on your website and send them promotional material straight to their inbox.

Apart from that, sending promotional emails is a convenient, personalized, and instant way for your business to inform customers about:

  1. Loyalty or Reward programs
  2. Contests or sweepstakes
  3. Sneak peek at new products
  4. Free Content – newsletters & e-books
  5. Products or Services
  6. Discount coupons and other promotions

Use Your Email List To Get The Word Out

Just remember to optimize your emails for mobile; this infographic by Lyfe Marketing reveals that 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices and 69% of mobile users delete un-optimized emails as soon as they receive those emails.

You can use the MailChimp email marketing platform to send out emails in bulk. But if you send those emails without paying attention to aesthetics, they’ll eventually end up getting deleted and the receiver will have a reason to unsubscribe from your email list because of a lack of perceived value.

Remember to design an eye-catching newsletter or a simple email header to appeal to your prospects. Simply create your custom email header in PosterMyWall and then export the design to your bulk email service of choice.

Don’t forget to optimize the text, use a clean and simple email design template and add a button for CTAs to elevate your emails.

Take Advantage Of Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based strategy where you work with partner services to drive consumer action, i.e., website visits, lead generation or conversions (sales).

The affiliated partners are paid when customers successfully perform the required actions – that’s why affiliates are more motivated to drive conversions.

It’s economical because your business only pays out when you get the conversion – so you spend only when you’re confident about the results.

Many times, affiliates also have an established customer base that you can attract without exhausting your current target market.

If your affiliates are online influencers, think of them as an extension to your online sales or marketing team that help you get the word out and establish your online presence.

They will also help solidify your reputation in the market because your target audience trusts them and they’re the ones championing your products.

If you’re new to the market, drafting affiliates for your business is an inexpensive way to generate customers because you’re not spending a fortune to test the waters – you’re getting results.

Harness the Power of Video

Another powerful tool in your marketing toolkit is video. It is continuing to grow in popularity and has fast become users’ favorite type of content 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands they support.

Most business owners hesitate to use video as a marketing weapon because it seems like a lot of investment. Video-making tools are difficult to master and professional video creators are expensive to hire, not to mention the creation process itself is very time-consuming.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. Using pre-produced videos from sites like PosterMyWall can enable you to create stunning and professional-looking video content for your social media platforms in a matter of minutes. If you’re ready to go all out, you can even customize 4K video templates for digital signage.

Harness the Power of Video

Video content is the wave of the future and instead of shying away from the investment, small business owners should hop on the trend with cost-cutting tools that can magnify their reach without breaking their budget.

Use ‘Bite-Sized’ Stories To Appeal To Younger Audiences

Instagram and Snapchat stories are fun and interactive by nature- they provide small snippets for information that’s on display for 24 hours before disappearing into the depths of the internet abyss. Use these precious hours to catch the limited attention spans of a younger audience and appeal to them.

Provide them with interactivity like scrolling up to find more information about your campaign or new product. You can even use the stories to help them participate in fun quizzes on your website where they’re having fun while providing you with valuable insights.

Videos keep audiences engaged more than images and text and are therefore more effective for conversions. They retain audiences for longer and help escalate click-through rates.

For instance, Redbull immerses its audiences in the moment with stories from various influencers like Aaron Fitzgerald. They even showed intense scenes of a helicopter flying upside down and engaged audiences through online polls in their stories.

Bite-sized content like Instagram stories work well because of its casual nature, and most importantly, it has the element of interest – leading to longer consumer retention and increased brand awareness.

Now it’s your turn! Use these marketing strategies to promote your products and create brand awareness that lasts. The key is to use low cost marketing options such as social media and email, coupled with effective tools that make the marketing process much easier.