5 Creative Ways To Market Your Small Business On A Tight Budget

Maximize Scant Resources

When it comes to a small business, getting visible in your local community—or the online community you serve—is paramount to attracting a target market that becomes sustainable. Whatever you can do to promote your brand is recommendable, within reason and legality, especially in these difficult times.

Some efforts will be more successful than others, and it’s wise to inform your choices with best practices that are already known and promoted through cutting-edge marketing companies. There are a lot of things you can do on a scant budget. Following we’ll explore five ways you can successfully market your operation at little expense.

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1. Co-Opt Staff Social Media

   How many do you have on staff? An SMB, or Small to Medium-Sized Business, is typically within a wide range of something between five and one hundred employees. You can expect an average of about 300 contacts per Facebook profile, with outliers as high as 5,000 contacts.

To expect one percent of those contacts per employee to align demographically with your small business is perfectly reasonable. If you’ve got ten employees, you’re looking at a range of thirty to five hundred potential conversions among your personnel alone—based just on that reasonable expectation.

How much is one conversion worth to you? If you’re running a contracting construction business, that could be $2k per conversion, for a total of $60k to $1,000,000 in potential revenue—just from the existing contacts of your employees’ Facebook. So find ways of incentivizing personnel toward co-opting Facebook as a means of marketing.

Additionally, look into Twitter, Instagram, and other similarly-aligned apps. You might want to take a back seat on TikTok, the army and pentagon are beginning to restrict employees from using it, owing to its Chinese roots. It could work well for you, just understand your information may well be stored on a foreign server somewhere.

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2. Acquire Natural PR Through Community Outreach

   Local soup kitchens, educational donations, free construction for a church—whatever your business does, find where a need exists within your local community, and fulfill that need for “free”. Do it right, and you’ll get a public thank you from those whom you assist. That will elevate you to a core status in your local community. You’ll be seen as an institution.

That said, you can’t always expect gratitude from those whom you assist. This is something you should be able to expect, but demanding it won’t do you any favors. One thing you might do is find businesses, charities, organizations, religious bodies, or government institutions that you could help, and who already have a gracious track record.

3. Use Tactics That Have Already Been Established

   Strategic application of marketing through known digital channels has effectiveness as well. Inform marketing through professional consultation. It’s no good using the latest techniques if you’re not sure how they work; that’s one of many reasons it makes a lot of sense to utilize tips like those this how to market your small business blog article from The Boost Apps suggests.

4. Incentivize Referral Through Promotions Between Clientele

   You’ve probably got at least a few satisfied customers who are willing to refer their friends or family who are a fit for your services to your business. You can offer coupons or discounts for the referral. Though Tesla vehicles are very expensive, part of that cost is deferred through referral bonuses of one kind or another, giving Tesla owners incentive to “proselytize” the brand.

You can do similar things. You can write reviews on behalf of satisfied customers, get their permission to post them, then reward them with a coupon. You can also send out information on your mailing list offering discounts, cash, or whatever is appropriate when they bring you a new client who converts. That new conversion will be worth more than what you spend in incentives.

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5. Make Partnerships With Clients Who Run Their Own Business

   Business partnerships with those who run their own businesses can be lucrative. Say as a contracting group you help auto shops expand their garage on a regular basis owing to the welders among your contractors.

Well, give that shop a discount if they’ll put up a placard or something advertising your work. You can run “business trades” where services are exchanged instead of money, preserving your budget and even legally reducing your tax burden.

Maximizing Your Marketing Impact
Partnerships with businesses you serve, incentivized client referral, the utility of established best practices, community outreach, and social media optimization all represent fine ways of cost-effectively marketing your operation.