Effectively marketing your brand can be the difference between shutting your doors and growing into an overnight success story. Because marketing can be expensive, many small businesses put off marketing campaigns and soon find themselves having to make the tough decision whether or not to shut down operations.
However, marketing does not need to be expensive to be effective, especially when trying to grow your small business. It’s less about flashy exposure and more about connecting with your business’s audience. Here are four tips to marketing on a shoestring budget:
1. Define Your Target Audience
Determining who would benefit your business, brand, and product can transform your business in terms of growth. Who is your target audience? Because when it comes to marketing efforts, it is extremely important they are geared toward those who would benefit the most from your business, otherwise your marketing campaign and marketing dollars are will go to waste.
For example, if you’re an online security company, you should be marketing to companies who have sensitive information, such as banks, financial firms, and so forth. Finding out who your target is, what they are looking for, and why they are looking for it will help you to reach them on a personal level through marketing and will keep you from wasting your money on unrequited efforts.
2. Creative Advertisements
One of the most effective marketing tricks is to advertise. While advertising on a billboard, over the radio, on TV, or in a magazine can wipe out your marketing budget, there are other types of advertisements that are just as effective yet much less expensive.
One of the least expensive ways to utilize advertising to its full advantage is to order a supply of reprints and issue them to customers and clients every chance you get. Include copies of your ad when responding to inquiries, when shipping products, and following up with a customer. Distribute copies to local businesses that would benefit from your service or product, or other businesses you would be interested partnering up with.
While the initial cost of an advertisement might be pricey, it is an invaluable marketing resource for your company that can be used repeatedly to amplify your business sales. In order to fund the initial ad, look to online companies like TitleBucks.com that can aid in small business loans.
3. Old Campaigns
In order to stay current, many companies are quick to generate new ideas for marketing campaigns because they think an old promotion is outdated. But, that is both a waste of time and money, for if the current promotion is still bringing in customers, it still has selling power.
4. Inexpensive Alternatives
Old-fashioned marketing, while still current, is much more expensive than marketing over technology. Advertising on large websites, blogs, or over social media costs next to nothing and yields big results.
Marketing can be done successfully with a small budget if you are willing to think creatively and take advantage of resources at hand.
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