Working on a tight budget can be frustrating, especially when you have a head full of fresh ideas about promoting your start-up business and making it a success.
However, every good business person loves to have a challenge and making your limited budget work hard for you can really get your creative juices flowing.
Let’s look at ways to get more creative with your marketing budget and look at ways to think outside of the box.
1: Free or cheap marketing sources
Search out free or cheap ways to market your business. Rather than paying through the nose for pay per click ads or bidding on keywords, look towards starting meaningful conversations on social media instead. With the recent Facebook changes to their news feed to favour more connections from people and less direct advertising coming from companies, this is an opportunity for you to grow some organic connections through reaching out to your chosen demographic via conversations.
2: Local networking groups
Many towns and cities across the country run local business networking groups. These can often be quite social events that involve sharing breakfast, lunches or dinners at a popular local restaurant or hotel. “What do you do for a living?”
This is the question you will hear most at these events so you have a golden opportunity to spread the word about your business, hand out business cards and meet with undiscovered people and other local businesses that could become very useful contact for you.
3: Engage with people
The days of cold and hard sales pitches are long over. While it is very tempting to sell your company to absolutely everyone you come into contact with, doing this can actually have the opposite of your desired effect.
People can get very turned off by brutal sales pitches, especially when the conversation you are having isn’t at all connected to your business. This is especially true with social media. People go to platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the first instance to socialise with their friends and talk about stuff.
They may look up an interesting company or check out a brand name to see if they have a social media presence. This is where you can win over organic visitors who are searching you out. Strike up a conversation and deliver them with lots of valuable information. Once you have built up their trust in you it will be easier to sell them your products or services.
4: Your image does count
The whole idea about using social media and targeted marketing strategies is to help establish your brand, build some online industry credibility and position yourself as an industry expert that gives out trusted advice.
You don’t have to pay out big bucks for this either as a lot of this can be curated online through reaching out to people and forging genuine connections.
People that trust you and believe in your product or service are your best source of free advertising. If you engage with people and make a good connection, they are more likely to share your information with their peers who will also share a lot of the same interests and likes, so you are widening your reach naturally without spending an extra penny. Your first impression can also be improved while saving money at the same time through using a professional call handling service. Using a service such as this is not only very cost-effective but will also create an impressive first impression when people call your business for the first time.
5: Everyone likes free stuff
The word ‘free’ is incredibly appealing. Who doesn’t like something for nothing, right? By formulating interesting, valuable and useful freebies to help promote your business, you will be spreading the word far and wide. This can help build brand recognition and trust, even if people don’t come and buy from you following your ‘freebie’ event, they will be more inclined to buy from you in future.
You could offer up a fun quiz where the top prize is one of your products, but follow this up with runner-up prizes of money off vouchers that can be delivered electronically for online or in-store purchases.
You could attend local or national events open to the public and give away free samples along with discount coupons to redeem against a large purchase on the day.