Marketing Your Small Business on a Budget
If you’re trying to build a business and your budget is relatively small, then you might be wondering what you can do to improve your chances of success. Some small companies assume that the best way to save money is to cut down on their marketing budget. However, the truth is that without a good promotional plan, businesses will never be able to raise awareness for the company.
Today’s organizations need to think carefully about their marketing strategies and what they can do to simultaneously keep costs low and generate sales at the same time. Here are just some of the ways that you can market your small business on a budget.
1. Have an Elevator Pitch
The first step is learning how to market all the time. Business leaders need to know how to sell their company to potential customers at a moment’s notice, which often means crafting an effective elevator pitch. Research tells us that most adults only have an attention span of around eight seconds, which means that companies don’t have long to capture their target audience’s attention.
Businesses need to work on refining the most compelling aspects of their business down into a single statement of value that they can use in all of their promotional campaigns and sales strategy. Get the elevator pitch down, and the rest will follow.
2. Create and Leverage a Community
Small companies don’t have to spend nearly as much on marketing if they can get their consumers to do their advertising for them. This means taking advantage of word of mouth marketing. To create a strategy for word of mouth marketing, companies need to start by building out a community of dedicated followers. The best way to do this is with an excellent content marketing plan and a strong social media presence.
Create effective content that causes customers to fall in love with the brand, and then make sure that they can connect with the business regularly through social media. Remember to choose the social media channel that the company’s customers visit most often. Additionally, businesses who want to make the most out of social media marketing also need to make sure that they’re posting on their chosen channel regularly – during the times when their customers are most active.
3. Collaborate with Influencers
Finally, influencers are one of the best ways for small companies to earn attention and credibility for their brands quickly, without having to invest too much money. Influencers create a launching pad for new customers, allowing them to piggyback off the trust that’s already built between an individual and their target audience.
Importantly, for small companies with a limited amount of money, the key thing to remember about influencers is that they don’t need to be major celebrities to be successful. While it is possible to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on influencer marketing, many customers say that they have an easier time resonating with micro influencers who are often more relatable. Micro influencers are also a lot less expensive to work with.
