If a small business doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing, it needs to be cheap.
Without spending a lot of money, find cost-effective marketing, such as direct mail advertisement, that can help small businesses make more money, get more people interested in their brand, and make their brand more well-known.
Do you want to save money on marketing? It gives you marketing plans that work better and cost less. The goal is to not spend a lot of money to get and keep people. This gives the business the best marketing return on investment (ROI).
You can use these easy and cheap ideas to help your small business sell itself and grow.
Determine Your Goals
There are KPIs and marketing goals that every small business owner needs to set first. This helps you sell and figure out how well it’s working.
Here are some possible goals to think about:
- Making more people aware of and reaching your brand
- Bringing in web visitors and leads
- Getting more sales and money
- Keeping customers longer and making them more loyal
SMART goals are clear, measurable, attainable, important, and have a due date.
You could set a goal of getting 50 new leads every month through content marketing in six months, exploring effective strategies like small business postcard marketing to enhance your outreach and engagement.
To keep track of your goals, choose one to three key marketing KPIs. Some of these measures are:
- Website Traffic
- Lead conversion rate
- Sales revenue
- Customer lifetime value
- Social media followers
To find out if your marketing is working, look at your KPIs. What works can be seen by comparing results over time and to goals.
Leverage Free Marketing Channels
Small businesses can get new customers with the help of marketing tools that are free or don’t cost much. These options raise company awareness and sales, which increases ROI.
Social Media
SM Free profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter let you easily reach a lot of people. Without ads, you can get more fans with contests, interesting content, and hashtags. Make content every day or every week to get people to read it. Analytics can show what people like.
SEO
SEO raises your website’s ranking on Google. Using keywords and meta descriptions to optimise your site and blog can bring you visitors from search engines without having to pay for ads. Use SEO to look at the websites of your competitors and target keywords that are related to your goods or services.
Networking Events
Free local networking events are great ways to meet people who might become buyers. You must bring your company’s “elevator pitch” and business cards. Get to know the participants and build ties that look good. To get people to know about your business, join groups like the Chamber of Commerce that hold regular networking events.
Focus On High ROI Activities
Given a lot of options, it might be tough to pick where to invest your time and money. You need to come up with plans that help you work and meet your goals.
Email Marketing
A strategy that costs less. Offering email lists, bulletins, and prizes can help you get leads and make sales. Email marketing gives a $32 return on every dollar spent on it. Send important information only to people who have agreed to get it, and make it simple for them to stop getting it.
Social Media
You can see ads for people based on what they like and who they are. Initialize a small daily ad spend and watch how many people buy. Instagram ads cost $5, and Facebook ads cost $2.50 for every $1. Spread the word about your best content, deals, and events on social media.
Content Marketing
Making things that people want to read, watch, and use includes blog posts, movies, and images. Get leads and build your brand by doing this over time. Tell people about your stuff and see who reads it. In general, content marketing gives back $5 for every $1 spent.
Utilize Low-Cost Tools
Due to limited funds, small businesses must use marketing methods and tools that don’t cost a lot. A lot of cheap SaaS systems have great benefits for small prices. Pick one of these:
- Pay-per-click technology from Google Ads lets you make ads that are specific to people and only pay when someone clicks on them. Start with $10 to $25 a day to test different ad types and see which ones work best.
- With Facebook ads, you can reach people based on where they live, their age, gender, hobbies, and behaviors. Begin small and add on as you see fit.
- You can use Mailchimp, a popular email marketing tool, for free with up to 2,000 users. Professionalize your email marketing to get customers and leads interested.
- With Canva, it’s cheap and easy to make great graphics. You can make images for social media, ads, flyers, infographics, and more with drag-and-drop tools.
- Buffer makes arranging and optimizing posts on multiple social media platforms easier. It’s free, and the basic plan is enough for most small businesses.
- Google Analytics lets you get free information about website visitors, conversions, sales funnels, and digital marketing.
Remember to use open-source tools that are free. Both WordPress and OpenOffice let you make websites and documents for free.
Use free SEO tools like Yoast SEO, Google Search Console, and Google Trends to make your site more visible.
With free and cheap SaaS tools, small businesses can run effective marketing efforts on a budget.
Monitor & Track Results
To maximise ROI, marketing needs to be checked on a regular basis. With analytics and data, you can see what worked and what didn’t.
Web Analytics
You can get useful information by adding Google Analytics or a similar web analytics tool to your website and marketing landing pages. Think about important measures like:
- Traffic sources and volume
- Bounce rates
- Pages per visit Goal conversions
- Best landing/exit pages
Over time, this data may show trends for good and bad that help you with your work.
Campaign Tracking
Adding campaign settings and UTM codes to links and landing pages is a good way to keep track of campaign ROI. To see statistics about a campaign, ad, email, etc., you can divide your analytics data into groups.
A/B Testing
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, raises response rates. One way to do this is to show a percentage of users one web page and another slightly different one. “Wins” go to the better form.