Marketing is essential for small businesses as it gets the word out so customers can find you. It also provides an opportunity to educate consumers about your products or services and establish your expertise. Marketing ensures people know and trust your brand, so they feel safe placing orders or hiring you to provide a service. If no one knows who you are, they won’t associate your brand with your industry. Another consideration is that marketing helps you understand your customers.
Through communication, you get a feel for customer sentiment, see how they respond to various marketing channels and determine how to make more meaningful connections to increase engagement with your brand. And what about creating a buzz about how fabulous you are? You can’t do this; you need your customers to do it for you. It’s difficult for customers to sing your praises if you don’t provide the proper channels like social media accounts, a Google business profile, or a website.
Although your small business might not have much of a marketing budget, you can still find ways to reach new customers and build stronger relationships with the customers you already have. Here, we share our marketing tips for small business owners on a budget to help you maintain your company’s relevance, establish an online presence, and expand your reach.
Start with Social Media
Social media is basically free. All you need to do is set up an account on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn and start posting. Well, kind of. You do need a social media strategy to ensure you understand your audience, create a brand voice, and have a schedule to keep your posts consistent. However, social channels allow you to create a strong online presence and begin connecting with your audience and customers in more meaningful ways.
If you understand your target audience, you can create a viable and affordable social media marketing strategy. There’s no need to invest in ads, and instead you can focus on branding and introducing your business to your audience. This also allows you to be recognized as an organic brand as opposed to an advertiser.
Choosing the best channels to reach your audience will also help you reach your customers using authentic content. A good starting point for content inspiration is repurposing existing content, such as blog posts, articles, white papers, videos, etc. This is very cost-effective and quickly helps establish expertise.
The trick is to use your unique value proposition (UVP) to help you shine as the brand that makes a difference in that area. You can start building a community around that expertise and harness the momentum you create to outshine the competition. Don’t brag, but instead, be authentic and helpful to establish your expertise in this area.
Start Building a Subscription Base for Email Marketing
One of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing is email marketing. It might feel outdated, but it continues to grow in stride. This is possibly because it is a permission-based form of marketing, which means you already have an advantage in that these subscribers want to hear from you. By collecting email addresses from your customers and prospects, you can start breaking them into segments to create targeted, personalized messages to achieve specific marketing goals.
Email allows you to achieve many different objectives, from nurturing leads to sharing information and building relationships to good old-fashioned product promotion. You don’t even need a creative team to produce effective emails, as you can use the templates available on a variety of email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. These platforms also allow you to manage your email lists to target your segments and filter out unsubscribes through their systems.
You can prepare successful email campaigns using these email marketing best practices:
- Create subscriber segments so you can target emails based on things like buying behavior, demographics, or past engagement
- Leverage personalization to ensure your emails remain relevant to see better results and reduce unsubscribes
- Use an email platform to create professional email designs
- Leverage email automation based on triggers such as thanking customers for purchases, soliciting reviews, or reminders for abandoned shopping carts
- Focus on improving your subject lines to encourage people to open your messages
- Use A/B testing to find out what elements, subject lines, CTAs, colors, headings, etc., work best to constantly improve results and create better-converting emails
- Continue to build your subscriber lists using social media, website subscription forms, contests, etc.
- Use strong CTAs to reach your objectives and make it clear what subscribers should do next
Network
This might seem too old school, but networking works. Choose industry events where you can meet fellow business owners or connect with new customers and leads. Use your community to participate in events to get your brand out there. You can also research local companies that might make good partners, such as a restaurant if you supply wine, interior designers if you are a house painter, or a nursery if you are a landscaper. You can then reach out to these companies to discuss ways you can work together and provide free marketing through your businesses. This isn’t about sales but instead about developing mutually beneficial connections.
Ask Customers for Referrals
At first, this might feel awkward, but there are ways to do this without having to actually pick up the phone. For example, as mentioned above, there are email automation programs you can use. Setting a trigger based on recent sales can send off an automated request complete with a link to your Google Business Profile, where customers can quickly click to rate and comment on your services. Nothing sells your brand better than word-of-mouth from customers who have experienced your products and services firsthand. This builds trust and doesn’t cost you a dime.
For referrals, consider offering a little incentive for each referral, such as a discount on their next purchase, a free sample, or an exclusive offer. This shows your appreciation while also making it more enticing for customers to take the time to mention you to a friend.
Build Your Own Content
No one knows your business, products, and services better than you and your team. You can build content for free by leveraging your internal resources to create content, whether it is blogs, videos, how-to instruction sheets, white papers, infographics, social posts and more. You can also use your team as inspiration for social media posts that highlight their accomplishments and their important contributions to the business. This content always comes across as very authentic, which can help create brand awareness and build trust.
Leverage User Generated Content
Once your social media is up and running, you’ll be able to leverage user comments. This is even more authentic and trusted than content created by your own team. Hashtags are an important tool for UGC as they encourage users to create content with your hashtag and post it on their own accounts. You can also track hashtags you create to find posts you can repost on your social channels. A hashtag challenge also works well as it encourages people to do something specific and tag it with your hashtag. You create the criteria to use the hashtag and watch the posts roll in. It also helps you focus on the type of UCG you want.
Encouraging customers to share their experiences also works well. In this case, the customer becomes the expert and shares their product knowledge with other customers. Again, this builds trust but also opens the door to creating exciting brand narratives.
Product reviews are a given for UCG, and you can repurpose them on your website and feature them on social posts thanking people for their feedback. This is important social proof to encourage potential customers to trust your brand.
Comments can also not only create an organic mini UGC, but also provide inspiration for content. For example, if someone asks how to tie a scarf, you can create a how-to video. If someone mentions they loved how a tool helped them complete a DIY project, you can provide a step-by-step blog about how to complete a similar project.
Produce Some Video
Video is always popular and can be produced affordably when you use team members. Although not everyone wants to appear in videos, you’re bound to have someone who doesn’t mind the attention and is also personable to help put a friendly face to your brand. And remember, videos can also be produced using slides and voice-over, and don’t necessarily require an “onscreen personality.” Just be sure that the way you present information is engaging, educational, or even entertaining based on the brand image you wish to create.
Complete Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is one of the most valuable free marketing tools at your disposal. You can set up your Google Business Profile and begin appearing on Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Your profile makes it easy for customers to find you and access information on your products and services. You can also use your profile for:
- Customer reviews
- Q&As
- Business posts and updates
- Product features
- Schedule appointments
- Take reservations
Most importantly, you will rank when users conduct a “near me” search, complete with all your business information, including your phone number, email address, and business hours. Google Analytics also provides insights on things like calls generated by your listing, how many views your profile gets and the types of searches that your business ranked for.
All these ideas allow you to produce quality branding and marketing materials affordably. You can harness the knowledge of your own team, leverage your customer-generated content, and apply different mediums to repurpose a similar message to showcase your UVP. Through collaboration with your team, networking and finding partnerships, you can also share talent and knowledge in a very organic and authentic way.
Fuel your growth with content! Let’s discuss budget-friendly content marketing – contact us today.