The main essence of marketing is to attract customers to a business. Marketing is therefore explained as an action businesses take towards promoting and increasing the sales of their products or services. This can be done by advertising or doing market research. Market Research is what educates a brand on Market Demand and helps the brand to produce goods and services that would drive customers to the businesses’ doorstep willingly and readily.
Research however determines that every business must invest 7% and above of its revenue into Marketing. The inconvenience of this concept is that most existing businesses and startups cannot afford marketing strategies that require 7% of a non-existent revenue.
So the problem is how small businesses with smaller budgets can perform marketing activities for big impact.
In this article, we give you 5 small budget marketing ideas with a big impact on your business. Just stay around and enjoy your reading…
5. Social Media Engagement
Social Media Engagement simply means the measure of people understanding and interacting with a brand. These interactions could be comments, likes, direct messaging, follows, shares, retweets, and so on.
In other words, without the intention of engagements, a brand doesn’t need to be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any other social media.
Engagements help prospects understand a Brand’s personality and build trust. By doing so, a brand builds its online community where loyal customers can be created.
How can a small brand use social media engagements to generate results?
- Contrary to longer forms of content, create short and educational posts that are easier for prospects to digest. A quick post that can be read in under a minute has a great effect.
- Traffic can be driven to the Brand’s website by promoting posts on all social media.
- Direct conversations with prospects privately or publicly showcase the brand’s voice and encourage engagement.
- Running polls and requesting feedback is a form of Market Research and this plays a big part in marketing.
This is one of the top small budget marketing ideas with a big impact on your startup or small business.
4. Use LinkedIn as a major marketing tool
LinkedIn is first of all a social networking website designed for business officials. To put it differently, LinkedIn is like any other social media but there’s no fun here, only professionalism.
LinkedIn as a marketing tool targets business-to-business relationships. It provides a platform to expand business networks and also, to employ new employers.
LinkedIn with all these awesome features is underutilized by business owners and sadly, low-budget businesses. How then can one use LinkedIn, a platform of over 700 million professionals as a marketing tool?
- Share your posts and discounted offers.
- Join forums and contribute consistently.
- Have conversations with connections made.
- Share other professional’s quality content. Helping the growth process of another professional educates prospects. It earns your brand respect and trust.
3. Use hashtags
A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded with a hashtag(#) to identify digital content on specific topics. “#denimSkirts” for instance reinforces the identity of a denim brand.
Strategically using hashtags can create awareness within your targeted audience and here are few ways to go about it. It is one of the leading small budget marketing ideas.
- Boost outreach of targeted audiences. Hashtags work on every social media platform, especially Instagram. With Instagram’s algorithm, hashtags help to categorize your content and make it available to prospects. Use precise hashtags. Borrow some from competitors and your Page’s followers if it is relevant.
- Create branded hashtags. A branded hashtag involves the brand name, the motto, a particular product on sale, and any other thing the brand is noticed for. Brand hashtags are beneficial because, whenever a social media user uses your Brand’s creative hashtags, it increases your brand’s presence on that platform.
- Jump on trending topics. Giving an honest opinion on a trending topic places a brand in the reach of audiences not even targeted. But be sure that the topic relates to your brand.
This is one of the small budget marketing ideas that works like magic.
2. Tag People and brands on Social Media
This is the simplest marketing idea on this list. Be sure to tag loyal customers and encourage them to tag you too. You can also with their permission, of course, tag happy customers so prospects know your business’ network and trustworthiness. Other popular brands can also be tagged. These actions would help
- Grow your social media following
- Potentially gain more clients
- Broaden the organic reach of your brand to more potential clients.
1.Content Marketing
Content Marketing is simply a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online materials like educational articles, videos, ebooks, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions on products and services and stimulates prospects to become loyal customers.
Be informed that writing easy-to-understand content is the goal. Although you don’t need strong writing skills to produce good content, be sure to bring a content writer on board if you don’t trust in your abilities. A slight grammatical error affects the authenticity of your whole brand.
Some benefits of good contents are:
- It demonstrates the brand’s expertise and authority.
- It also shows a genuine desire to educate prospects which in turn builds their trust in the brand.
- Great content provides prospects with answers they may have asked themselves.
- High-quality content drives traffic to the brand’s website and makes it more visible on Google.
And this happens to be our number one on the list of small budget marketing ideas that make a big impact.
Conclusion
The good news is that, because your business budget is low, you can apply these marketing ideas and build a willing customer base long before the production of the goods. Feeling brave? You can offer pre-order services once you’ve built the desired trust with customers.
All the above-mentioned small-budget marketing ideas with big impact take little to no money out of your business account. All you need is a few minutes daily and with consistency, commitment and collaboration, you’d be making sales you never imagined.
Lastly, always be quick to reply to prospects. It is the only way to show their importance to the brand.
We hope this article on the top 5 small budget marketing ideas with big impact was helpful. Try some of these ideas and comment below how fast you got your results?
Do you have more to add to the list? Don’t hesitate to leave it in the comments box below. If you’d like to find out more about LinkedIn marketing and content marketing, you can get in touch with us here.