7 Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses

If you’re about to take the plunge and invest in  marketing, you probably want to know how much you should be spending. According to marketing experts, small businesses should spend 1-10 percent of their gross revenue on marketing.

Creating a clever marketing for small business is costly and this is why this article has been created to showcase the low cost marketing ideas for small businesses.

If you’re seeking to start your marketing campaign with a low budget, it is important to know the amount you  should spend on marketing your business. Your marketing budget should be a percentage of your revenue.

Your marketing budget should typically covers costs for advertising, promotion and public relations. Each amount should varies based on the size of the business, its annual sales and how much the competition is advertising.

So, if you’re thinking to spending money on marketing, you probably want to know the low cost marketing ideas for small businesses. While this will depend on your goals, here are the places you should be spending your marketing budget, according to how consumers are looking for businesses.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses

While this will depend on your goals, here are the low budget marketing ideas for small businesses:

  1. Google Business Listing
  2. Social Media Optimization
  3. Run a Successful Contest
  4. Offline Recognition
  5. Pay Per Click Advertising
  6. Create Affiliate Program
  7. Know your Competitors

1. Google Business Listing

Google Business Listing is one of the easiest low cost marketing ideas for small businesses. It is a free business profile creation offered by Google. It allows you to provide details and photos of your business, including your location, services, and products. Creating this free profile is a great way to increase your visibility across Google services.

Creating the free small business profile is a great way to increase your visibility across Google services. Information from your Google Business Profile may appear in Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Shopping.

Whether you’re looking for foot traffic or web traffic, Google is the ultimate search referrer. A Google Business Profile helps ensure that people find your business when looking for products and services like yours in their local area.

The Google Business listing shows searchers where and how to visit your business. A Google Business Profile also improves your local searches. In particular, a listing for a local business is more likely to appear when people search for a nearby business using Google Maps.

To get the most out of your business, creating a Google Business Listing through Google My Business is good and low marketing idea for your small business.

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2. Social Media Optimization

Your customer are always waiting for you on social media. All the customers that can meet your target are poresent on social media. There are over 4 billion people active on social media and even more using it as the primary medium for marketing their brands, now is the time to invest a considerable part of your marketing resources in social media marketing.

Undoubtedly, social media optimization is one of  the best low cost marketing ideas for small businesses. Due to the increased competition and multiple changes in the social media algorithms, it is becoming increasingly difficult to put your brand out there on social media. Today, you have to put out relevant content and have a strong social media optimization strategy in place.

A Social media optimization is the use of social media networks to manage and grow an organization’s message and online presence. As a digital marketing strategy, social media optimization can be used to increase awareness of new products and services, connect with customers, and mitigate potential damaging news.

It is a way of doing something great on social media. Time is money, so if you don’t have enough time to create a range of new social profiles or strategies for your business, you can just find one simple, awesome thing that you can do well on social media. For example, you can posts videos of all your services, reviews and completed projects.

3. Run a Successful Contest

You’ve likely heard this a million times, but I’ll say it again: To run a successful contest, you need to know your marketing goals. There’s really no shortage of strategies for how to run a contest. So, drive your success by defining the outcomes you need. Your contest’s goals should be aligned with your business and marketing objectives.

Everyone loves to win something, so a great, low cost marketing ideas for small businesses to get your brand out there is to run a competition for something that people really want, whether that’s a free product or service from you, or just a popular prize. If you get people to do something in return for their entry such as liking and sharing your page, subscribing to your newsletter or just giving you their email address, you’ll reap the benefits without breaking the bank.

Running a successful contest or competitions can help customers find you, they can also help solidify the loyalties of your existing customers. They can build your mailing lists, reward your biggest fans, and increase your social media followers. The can be a fantastic way to mobilize and engage your customers; potential and current.

4. Offline Recognition

Online recognition or marketing is important, but don’t forget to get your brand offline in the “real” world! Print advertising, business cards, magazine/newspaper features and corporate branding at events are all great marketing ideas  and they’re low cost marketing ideas for small businesses. Try a few low-cost offline  marketing ideas to get your brand out there.

offline marketing is any type of marketing that is not done through the internet. This encompasses a wide range of mediums and formats, from TV and radio commercials to billboards and print ads.

It is a marketing idea involving any advertising or promotional practice that leverages traditional offline media. This includes channels such as business card, banners, television, radio, billboards, print, and in-person events. More often than not, modern-day offline marketing methods are built to support or supplement online efforts.

5. Pay Per Click Advertising

As the name implies, pay per click advertising is an online advertising model that enable the advertiser to pay only when the advert or ads link get clicked.

PPC or pay-per-click is a common advertising model in online campaigns that helps drive traffic to a website. It is very efficient because the advertiser only pays the publisher when the ad gets clicked on. This prevents advertisers from investing their budgets into campaigns that can’t be measured quantitatively. This type of advertising is a good and low marketing idea.

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6. Create Affiliate Program

Creating an affiliate program can boost your business, product sales and expand your circle of raving fans. You can set your customers up for success as clients and affiliate marketers, which, in turn, makes them valuable lifetime customers who grow your business.

Your affiliate program generates the affiliate links & coupon codes for your affiliates, tracks the clicks & purchases through affiliate links, and shows you the exact amount you need to pay each affiliate.

Commissions are at the core of affiliate programs. They can make your program. Therefore, setting up commissions for your affiliates is the way out.

7. Know your Competitors

Knowing your competitors  can help you to make your business,  products, services and marketing stand out. It will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to respond to rival marketing campaigns with your own initiatives.

The knowledge you have about your competitors is to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses, and improve your own business performance. You can also assess any threats posed by both new entrants to your market and current competitors. This knowledge will help you to be realistic about how successful you can be.

All businesses face competition. Even if you’re the business in town you must compete with other businesses.

Knowing your competitors  will help you evaluate the information about the available market. This should tell you whether there are gaps in the market you can exploit. It should also indicate whether there is a saturation of suppliers in certain areas of your market, which might lead you to focus on less competitive areas.


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