You might have a creative idea, an amazing product, or a service to be proud of, but you lack the funds necessary to market that product or service. This is a huge obstacle for every small business. Furthermore, it may discourage you from even entering the market because it may seem like an impossible mission to stand out among all those popular brands without a decent marketing fund.
This undoubtedly strikes you as unfair since you might have a much better product than that big brand that has the means to promote itself to customers everywhere. However, a huge digital marketing budget is not necessarily essential if you do your part to research and apply some low-budget marketing tactics. You just need time and patience as you’ll likely do it all by yourself, as opposed to big businesses with entire teams dedicated to that.
In this post, we will shed some light on those affordable or free marketing tactics and show you how your small business can come up with a perfect marketing strategy to compete with the big names.
Start with the Free Tactics
Let’s assume you’ve already done the basic step of identifying your target audience. Now you have to think of a way to approach them. This is actually easy and there are some completely free marketing tactics you can apply to reach your audience.
1.Use Social Media to Engage with Your Audience
Using social media to engage with your audience is not a new idea and it should be used by every struggling small business trying to reach its customers. Signing up and creating an account is still free on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn so if you haven’t done that yet, by all means, create accounts for your business.
You can post, comment on other people’s posts, and interact with your target audience. Being present online and being responsive is so important for a budding small business.
2.Share Your Content
Another way you can use social media is to share the content you publish on your blog or YouTube channel. Again, this is assuming you’ve already created a website for your business, which is kind of essential in this day and age.
Whatever content you publish, you can promote it by sharing it here. Also, you can share other people’s useful content if you think your audience would find it helpful. You can’t go wrong with this as long as you post useful content relevant to your niche and audience.
3. Create Contests/Giveaways
What you’ve probably noticed on social media lately is a surge of contests and giveaways. And they work every time! Big businesses and smaller brands alike are using this marketing tactic to gain more followers and make more money.
Offering something for free (your product/service) in exchange for a decent number of shares, likes, and new followers can help you boost your business. The rules are pretty straightforward so you can easily start a contest on your social media page. And it doesn’t cost you anything, really.
Step Up Your SEO Game
Let’s not forget that sharing posts on social media and having a website is the bare minimum. Every business does that. But not every business invests in learning about SEO and building their SEO strategy as much as they should. At least not small businesses as they are typically on a limited budget so they eliminate whatever expenses are deemed redundant. Right?
Wrong, actually. Focusing on SEO should be a priority if you want to grow your business. Certainly, your SEO strategy won’t bring you results overnight and yes, you don’t have the same budget as your competitor big brands. But SEO requires consistent work to help you emerge on the top of the page for local search results. For example, if your business is based in NYC, naturally, first, you’d need to learn about the market in that city and create an SEO strategy for NYC.
Gradually, as you keep working on your strategy and show consistent quality, you will join the highest-ranked businesses in Google search results.
Read up on SEO, follow the trends, and don’t lose sight of the long-term goal.
Produce Quality Content Consistently
Producing and publishing quality content on your business blog is not exactly an expensive digital marketing strategy reserved for large corporations only. It’s a cost-effective method to gain the trust of your audience and help them solve their problems by offering useful, clearly-written content.
Many businesses realize this but they lack the discipline and the will to keep producing quality content consistently. However, the fact that Google favors great content over low-quality articles regardless of the budget behind them should inspire you to keep going.
Quality content gets shared, liked, and brings you lots of new potential customers. If you regularly publish informational content that answers their burning questions, you become an authority in your domain. And what’s better than that?
Author bio
Alexander Hunkin is an Australian-based startup advisor with in-depth experience in growing business. His meaningful and strategic advices have helped in setting and growing many startup companies in Brisbane and Perth. Alexander is also a content creator for different niches. The top ones are business, career, finance and marketing. He aspires to share his experiences and is always on the lookout for the next opportunity to enhance his skills. When he isn’t busy working, you can find him cooking exotic meals, scuba diving and cycling.