Effective marketing is, of course, a must for every business. But sometimes it can result in frightening costs. This is very daunting for a small business trying to make their mark in a crowded atmosphere. But it is possible to do some good marketing without spending a lot of money. Here’s a quick guide to doing just that!
Invest in analytics
When you don’t have that impressive a marketing budget, you may be tempted to skip on analytics. After all, decent analytics isn’t free. And if analytics isn’t actually marketing, then why dedicate any of your marketing budget to it? Isn’t it better invested in opening up another marketing channel?
The problem with this thinking is that you risk wasting that marketing budget. When you don’t have much money to play with, that’s when you really need to get some bang for your buck. You need to make sure that the marketing you’re invested in is actually doing something. Otherwise, you’ll be left not knowing how effective a given campaign is. And if you can’t get the right data there, you could be wasting money on a campaign that isn’t doing much for you. This is why you should invest in analytics. You can look into things like a call tracking system to get the data you need.
Tend to your website
I’m sure you’ve heard before that your website is a great marketing tool. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that your business needs a website. It’s not something that only e-commerce businesses need to focus on.
Of course, it could be argued that you need a high marketing budget to get a lot of traffic to your website. But that’s not necessarily true. The most important thing is that you have high-quality content on your website, and lots of it. It doesn’t matter what marketing campaign you would go with. All of them would require that you have the content on your website in order for them to be effective. So one of the best things you can do if you’re short on marketing cash is to improve your website in any way you can. This can help you increase your Google visibility and your user loyalty naturally.
Don’t forget the power of flyers, posters, and stickers
This is especially important if you’re a small business focussing on a particular area. But it’s also important for all Internet-based businesses. The fact is that the rise of recent technology has left many people forgetting about physical marketing. We seem to be focussing all our attention on online marketing. Which is important, of course. But it’s not like flyers, posters, and stickers completely lost their efficacy!
Printing out a bunch of flyers and posters is usually incredibly cheap. Distributing flyers and posters is fairly easy, though it does take time and physical effort. As for stickers, these can be very eye-catching. It’s legal to post these sorts of things around. Flyers can go under car window wipers. Posters can be freely attached to most walls, unless it’s specialised advertising space. Stickers on lampposts make for great and affordable guerrilla-type marketing.