Published on December 10th, 2018 | by Sunit Nandi

5 Creative Ways to Market Your Business on a Limited Budget

As the old adage goes: you have to spend money to make money, and this is certainly true of marketing. But if you have a small budget, the prospect of marketing your business can be overwhelming. The good news is that marketing on a limited budget is possible.

Here are five inexpensive ways to market your small business on a shoestring budget.

1. Try Email Marketing

Growing and nurturing your email list is essential, not only for short-term sales but also for the growth of your business in the long run. Studies show that 91% of consumers say they like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with while 72% say they prefer businesses to contact them via email.

Build your subscriber list by offering sign-up forms on your website, checkout pages, and blog posts. Be sure to connect these to your HubSpot or MailChimp account so that you can be able to create a schedule for newsletters, promotional emails, and other announcements.

2. Optimize Your Virtual Presence

Almost everyone uses social media, so your business should, too. While your business needs to be on social media, it doesn’t necessarily have to be on every platform. Each social media platform is unique in its own right and requires unique ways of engagement. Rather than trying to master it all at once, choose a few that work for your business and master those first.

If you’re a small business, consider adding your business to online directories such as maps, Angie’s List, Yelp and HubSpot. This helps to increase your search engine visibility.

3. Gift Guides

One of the best ways to market your business during the holiday season is through a gift guide. A survey from the National Retail Federation (NRF) found that more than half of online shoppers found the perfect gift idea through a gift guide. A gift guide gives your customers options and helps cut through the noise. The guide could either be a list of gifts and descriptions on your website or a standalone blog posts and even Pinterest boards.

You can highlight some of your products and promote your gifts on the guides. To make your gifts more memorable, consider having your logo engraved on them. Ponoko offers laser cutting and engraving services at a great price. The process is also simple – just choose a design from a catalog of more than 99 sheet materials, download the template, add your design and upload it to get an instant quotation.

4. Search Engine Optimization

SEO are techniques, strategies, and practices designed to improve your website’s ranking on search engine result pages. With quality SEO, you can create online exposure for your brand and strengthen your business’s position in the competition.

Some simple steps you can take to establish a strong SEO foundation include creating backlinks, keyword research, on-page optimization, content optimization, and page speed optimization.

5. Customer Service

Good customer service is a great way to keep customers coming back and send them away happy – happy enough to refer other people to your business. To provide excellent customer service, answer your business phone all the time, don’t make promises you can’t keep, listen to your customers and handle customer complaints in a professional manner.

These five inexpensive ideas will help kick-start your small business marketing. Just be sure to measure the effectiveness of each marketing strategy to identify those that are supporting your marketing and business goals and those that are not.

Tags: budget, creative, limited, market, marketing

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.