There are thousands of guidelines on steps anyone can take to promote a small business, drive visibility and make new sales but most times, you may not get a decent result even after expending your resources.
As someone who’s tried out some of these strategies during our early days, I’ve found that a number of the steps could not work because it was either they are not relevant to small businesses or businesses on a tight budget; in some cases they were just location focused.
So, we have been forced to try out other options. And over the years, in the course of doing that to see what works, we have evolved some key strategies that have provided consistent results and have been very useful for small businesses in developing economies.
In this guide, I’ll be sharing some of these marketing ideas and insights with you and how you can use them to promote a business on a tight budget.
Engage in Social Media Marketing
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One of the most cost friendly ways to promote a small business on a tight budget is the social media. In fact, you can literally start your small business marketing on the social media, free. And the best part is; there are a lot of options.
When I launched out my brand some years back, the social media provided one of the best places to build my brand, free. It also gave us our first few selling clients.
As a matter of fact, we were extremely on a tight budget with nothing to spend on marketing campaigns so using the free social media marketing options was a no brainer.
As a small business on a budget seeking to get the exposure that will yield more sales for your business, you can use social media marketing as a starting point.
Remember I mentioned you have a lot of options to choose from. This includes, choosing your preferred social media platforms, content types and content format.
But, regardless of your content reference; to make the most out of your social media marketing, you want to consider choosing the platforms with the largest number of your preferred target audience.
So, if you’re a business targeting GenZs, instead of focusing your marketing on LinkedIn for example, you want to opt for platforms with a large number of GenZs like Tiktok, Instagram etc.
Also when it comes to content format, if your audience has a preference for video content over text, then you have to provide that kind of content over your personal preference.
Use Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves the creation and sharing of specific kind of digital content to a well identified audience to drive a specific outcome.
While content marketing is not necessarily aimed at promoting a business directly, one of the major advantages is that it stimulates people’s interest in the business.
One of the things that makes content marketing stand out as a top option to promote a small business is that it is mostly free. And over the years, it has become the cornerstone of digital marketing.
With this, a lot of entrepreneurs have been attracted to using content as a marketing strategy without having to pay for it.
You can use this as a strategy to promote your small business on a budget. All you want to do is to identify your audience, find out what they need and how they are searching for these things online.
As soon as you’ve done this, head over and create content based off these needs, making sure that your content has solved the specific needs of your target audience, positioned you as the clear expert in your niche while directing your audience towards the clear next steps.
PS: Before embarking on content marketing, it is very important to understand your target audience and their needs so you can create the kind of content that will work for them.
Optimize for Search Visibility
While content marketing is a top choice to promote a small business on a budget, optimizing your content for the search engine is a stellar strategy that can position your content for a better visibility.
So after creating your content, you want to optimize it with the top keywords that are commonly used by your audience.
Outside optimizing your content for visibility, you also want to make effort to optimize your entire website itself. Pay attention to updating each and every one of the web pages on your website with your main keywords while also fixing other important areas like technical SEO, off page SEO etc.
Optimizing your website for visibility is very important as doing this correctly can get you to attract a decent level of traffic without spending money on advertising. This is in fact one of the top strategies you want to put in place.
Also, beyond your website, you want to also optimize your social media content with the right hashtags and other important tags. This is very crucial in getting you the kind of visibility that will lead to a greater impact for content on both your social media platforms and your website.
PS: Remember that no amount of search optimization will deliver a sustainable result for low quality content. So, even with your optimization effort, create high quality content and stay focused on delivering value for your target audience.
Use Email Marketing
Email marketing has evolved to become a top marketing strategy used by businesses to reach direct clients and other businesses. It is also one of the popular options to promote a small business on a budget.
One thing that makes email marketing stand out is the fact that it is warm marketing. When people subscribe to your email, it means they trust you and will be ready to listen to you.
With that level of trust, it becomes easier to create a marketing campaign that can be effective far more than the other campaign options.
That said, there are different ways to promote your business using email marketing. You can start with building an email list from the scratch, partnering with other related businesses with a large email data base or using alternate email sources.
As soon as you’ve been able to gather your email addresses, you want to segment and classify your list so you can send more targeted email to the users, based on your goals and their specific interests.
After this is done, you can decide to be sending a newsletter to your subscribers to create some sort of relationship with them. This newsletter could be sent at weekly, biweekly or bimonthly rates, using whatever sending options that works for you.
PS: To get the most out of email marketing you don’t just want to address the needs of your target audience, you have to make effort to captivate them with your offer, your call to action and the mail itself.
Pay Attention to Storytelling
Storytelling provides a powerful opportunity for entrepreneurs and small businesses to position their brands as top leaders in their field.
If you take a look at social media and the blog, you’ll notice how some brands are using storytelling to showcase their brand journey, project their successes while also positioning their offers.
As a beginner, storytelling was a major part of our social media success. As a business on a budget, it was the best marketing tool we used to showcase our journey and the things we were doing to people who had no idea what we were doing.
As an entrepreneur, you can use storytelling to promote a small business on a budget by capturing your special moments and sharing them with your audience as part of content marketing, showcasing your work, milestones and achievements among other important day to day activities around your business.
You don’t necessarily want to aim at marketing or promoting your business directly while engaging in storytelling but you want to create this kind of content with the goal of informing, educating your audience and positioning your brand right in front of them.
One of the important outcomes of storytelling is that outside improving the impression of your audience about your brand, it also gets to position you as an expert in your niche or industry.
Take up Guesting Opportunities
Guesting opportunities allows brands to get visibility from platforms while adding value to such platforms in terms of their content, resources or partnerships.
It has been used by many brands to promote a small business on a budget and you can key into this to market your own business without having to spend an arm and a leg.
Now guesting opportunities presents itself in different forms, it could be in the form of guest posting where you write and publish content on other websites, in return for a backlink, podcast guest opportunities, where you get to talk about the subject matter that is important to your brands and audiences.
It could also be about other areas. But whatever it is, you want to seize up guesting opportunities and use them to market your small business, free.
To get started, you can engage in pitching brands with guest posting opportunities for your ideas, approach podcast host for features or get on platforms by influencers.
As a rule of thumb, be prepared to add a unique value to your host and their audience. And before getting started, make an effort to approach brands that are relevant to your audience and marketing goals.
Connect & Collaborate
Marketing a small business on a budget can be a daunting task for newbies without a lot of experience or networks but your willingness to connect, network and collaborate with others can get you grounded while giving you some options to get started with.
It is one strategy that has worked for most businesses in developing countries especially when it comes to promoting a business on a budget and there are many ways you can do this.
For example, you can collaborate and network with other people in your local communities. This can be virtually or physically. Currently we have such communities on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and even on WordPress etc.
You can join these communities, connect, share your ideas and also learn from others within your growth level. And you can also create options where you team up together, collaborate on projects or even partner together for complimentary purposes.
Such partnerships can provide you with new customers or even resources to deliver on your business, depending on how you put it together.
PS: While contemplating this kind of marketing options, you want to make sure that the outcomes are beneficial to both parties involved.
Final Words
Before heading right in to promote any business on a budget, you want to identify the marketing goal you want to achieve and then go ahead to create some sort of a plan. As soon as this is all sorted out, you can get started with implementing these strategies.
With that said, you don’t have to sit back and relax after taking these steps to promote your business, you have to monitor and evaluate your performance at intervals to know what’s working and the next step forward for your business.
Rest assured, marketing your business on a budget can be tasking but with consistency of effort and the right strategies, you’ll eventually get the results coming in.
Where it seems you’re not able to make headway, reach out to our team here let’s work with you to get your business to where it should be.
Now it’s your turn. What are your biggest challenges when it comes to marketing a business on a budget? Drop your comments below.
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