For scaling up every business, marketing is necessary. Without marketing any business can not be able to generate much revenue. Marketing is important to engage customers. With marketing, any business helps to build and maintain the company’s reputation. Marketing helps to build a relationship between a business and its customers. Every business whether it is small or large wants to boost sales. For small businesses, they don’t have much capital to market their business on large scale. So, there are many inexpensive marketing ideas for a small business that will be affordable. As marketing helps the management team to make informed decisions. Good marketing beats the competition, delights the customer, and returns well in comparison to investment.
In this article, we will discuss all the low-cost marketing ideas for small businesses so that small businesses should implement these ideas and look for a great profit.
1. Publish Great Content
Content doesn’t just mean posting lengthy reports or news posts, content can be videos, blog posts, slideshows, or images. Content helps you attract, engage, and delight prospects and customers, bring new visitors to your site, and ultimately, generate revenue for your company. Content marketing brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less. Companies that publish about 16 blog posts per month get 3.5X more traffic than those that post four or fewer posts per month. A good starting point for your content strategy plan is to set out a content marketing mission statement.
A content marketing statement contains the following points:
- Your target audience
- The content you’ll use to reach them
- The benefit they’ll get
Your goal about publishing great content must contain the following aspects:
- Improving more revenue
- Making more sales
- Getting more traffic to your site
- Gain influence and authority
- SEO success
- Always reduced marketing costs as much as possible
- Social media engagement
2. Website
Making a website is one of the important marketing tools. Any website with valuable content and great visuals keep your business far from your competitors and increase your revenue. Simply website marketing means promoting a business website to bring more visitors. Website marketing strategy needs to focus on getting more people to your site in the first place.
Website marketing strategy must include the following points:
- Optimizing your website for search engines so more people can find you
- Promoting your website on social media
- Advertise on social media platforms (Instagram or Facebook ads etc.)
- Offer a webinar or sales demo (live or recorded)
- Offer downloadable educational resources like white papers, e-Books, ultimate guides, etc.
- Running a contest or giveaway
Niku Mandal
3. Create Instructional Videos
According to a recent TechSmith study, 53 % of people reported watching two or more instructional videos per week. Instructional videos are the best delivery method if you’re serious about teaching others, growing your business, or building an online course. You should learn about your target audience and its main points. You must set a clear learning objective. Short instructional videos that focus on teaching one specific topic.
4. Business Partnerships
A business partnership is a way of organizing a company that is owned and sometimes run by two or more people or entities. Creating the partnership agreement and setting up the proper entity/structure for the partnership are the two most important steps in the partnership process. The best structure for a partnership is the limited liability company (LLC).
Types of partnerships:
- General partnership: A general partnership is the most basic form of partnership. It does not require forming a business entity with the state. In most cases, partners form their business by signing a partnership agreement.
- Limited partnership: Limited partnerships (LPs) are formal business entities authorized by the state. They have at least one general partner who is fully responsible for the business and one or more limited partners who provide money but do not actively manage the business.
- Limited liability partnership: A limited liability partnership (LLP) operates as a general partnership, with all partners actively managing the business, but it limits their liability for one another’s actions.
- Limited liability limited partnership: A limited liability limited partnership (LLLP) is a newer type of partnership available in some states. It operates like an LP, with at least one general partner who manages the business, but the LLLP limits the general partner’s liability so all partners have liability protection.
5. Marketing to Existing Customers
From survey found that marketers spend on average just 21 % of their marketing budgets on existing customers. The more customers that you can keep and continue to sell to, the more likely you are to achieve your business goals. According to Marketing Metrics, the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%.
The benefits of customer marketing:
- Better customer retention
- More referrals and positive word-of-mouth
- Customer marketing means social proof
- Satisfied customers can provide a steady stream of referral business
- Better conversion rates from existing customers
- Golden opportunity to improve your offering and customer satisfaction rates
- According to Bain and Company, attracting new customers will cost your company 5-25 times more than keeping an existing customer
6. Local Marketing
Local marketing is a beautiful mix of search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, content marketing, and social media advertising. You can reach out to local reporters. Local marketing is a strategy that targets potential customers within a specific radius. Local marketing is especially important for small and medium-sized businesses that rely on people visiting their physical location to purchase goods or access a service, including shops, dentists, physiotherapists, bars, restaurants, and car dealerships. In local marketing, you can go to shop for your digital and print advertisements.
Souvik Dey
7. Social Media
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.
- Facebook: Best for brand awareness, advertising
- Twitter: Best for public relations, customer service
- Instagram: Best for natural-looking media, behind-the-scenes, and user-generated content, advertising
- LinkedIn: Best for B2B relationships, business development, and employment marketing
- YouTube: Best for brand awareness, entertainment, and how-to videos
- Snapchat: Best for brand awareness, advertising
- Pinterest: Best for visual advertising, inspiration
Benefits of Social Media Marketing:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate leads and boost conversions
- Learn from competitors
- More inbound traffic
- Higher conversion rates
- Better customer satisfaction
- Gain marketplace insights
- Faster and easier communication
- Networking & Partnerships become simple
- Customer feedback
- Impress potential customers
8. SMS Marketing
SMS Marketing is sending promotional campaigns or transactional messages for marketing purposes using text messages (SMS). Text messaging is a very effective and direct line of communication to the customer. SMS marketing offers vast opportunities for engaging with the audience, limited only by creativity and the size of the phone number list. SMS campaign takes 3-6 seconds for the delivery. Speed is an essential factor in SMS marketing efficiency.
9. Google My Business
A Google My Business account lets you show up in search results when people are looking for you online. It’s free, which makes it an affordable marketing tool for small and big businesses alike. A Google My Business account lets you keep customers informed. Customers are 70% more likely to visit businesses with a Google My Business listing. Google My Business reviews help in building trust. Google finds that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Baishali Das Adhikari
10. Email marketing
Email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email. Email marketing helps you connect with your audience to promote your brand and increase sales. You can do a lot of things with emails, like sell products, share some news, improve your rating, or tell a story. There are 3.8 billion email users worldwide, so if you’re looking for a way to reach your customers, email is the perfect place to find them. When it comes to customer acquisition, email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
ATHUL C K
11. Pamphlet Distribution
Pamphlet distribution is a paper flyer that is inserted into the newspapers. With newspaper insertion, you have the most cost-effective method of advertising. Leaflets can grab attention in better ways than digital marketing like tweets and emails cannot. Leaflets can showcase your product or service to new customers also increase attendance for your events and exhibitions.
12. Newspaper Advertising
Newspapers are released daily. Newspapers are a suitable medium for goods requiring mass advertisement. Newspaper advertisements must be ‘catchy and attractive’. Local newspaper costs tend to be relatively low and focus your ad on a specific geographic market. Advertising costs do increase with national newspapers, but the audience is so much wider than the value offsets the extra investment. Newspaper advertising allows you to place your content wherever you want. Newspaper advertising typically costs less per thousand readers than television, radio, and direct mail advertising.
