Marketing is something you need even if you are on a shoestring budget. No business can survive and thrive without marketing. Thankfully, today’s digitalized world makes everything so affordable that you can have a flourishing startup without spending massive amounts on advertising.
Let’s read about six ways to marketing your small business without spending a lot (courtesy Danish from BrandRebel).
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is like celebrity endorsement, except that you can find and work with an influencer online at much cheaper price, they might even do it for free. The trick is to find the right person.
It will take you years to get trusted by your customers but this process can be elevated if you do it through influencer marketing. According to a research, 70% of teens fall for influencers more as compared to the common celebrities. This is all because of the hard-earned trust level they have managed to maintain over years of hard work. In fact, 4 out of every 10 millennial subscribers find these influencers more understanding than their own friends.
There is a vast variety of audience these influencers possess. While some have working women as a majority part, other might have a health freak, depending on the kind of content they create. Some might have a good mix of all as well. You know your product and thus decide accordingly which influencer will be the right choice to speak for your product. Choose wisely and look for a huge number of followership as well as engagement. Be human and very polite while contacting them and offer them free products for a good and honest review and promotion of your product. While this strategy won’t cost you a fortune, it will also cut down your time resource you would otherwise be spending on endorsement of the product yourself.
Meme marketing
As prolific as they are, memes are also very impactful. It is an established fact that content with a hint of good humor in it has more power to grab attention and stay longer in the memory of audience than the factual or serious toned ones.
Memes will specially work for your business if your product is purposed for millennial or teenagers because they are the common users of social media. The sense of reliability these memes have over the audience is the key to get your brand potential customers. The more the real and insightful the situation presented in a satirical way, the better the connection fostered in your target audience. Be wary not to cross the fine line between having an authentic and an overly conservative meme that might offend the people in anyway.
Social media marketing
Social media is the new television. Therefore, why even bother spending fortunes to hire big celebrities to endorse your products when social media can do it free for you. Since the past few years, there is a notable increase in the social media videos viewership.
Keep yourself apprised of ongoing trends in your country and incorporate them in your videos and see how swarms of people get hooked to them. Just take one or two really explosive trends, not all of them and leverage the fad they carry.
Live videos both on Instagram and Facebook are the new popular. People like to become a prt of your ventures from the comfort of their homes. For better engagement, show them behind the scenes of your business and how your product is being manufactured. It works as a ladder to build trust when people get to see themselves rather than hear.
Voice search strategy along with SEO
As rapidly as the voice activated technology is getting adopted by users, it is time to use this shift in consumer behavior to your advantage for more reach to your audience with no or minimum spending. This is your ultimate challenge to optimize your web page according to voice search because VEO comes with a fiercer competition than SEO. There are only three top results in the search and your goal is to be one of them.
Optimize your webpage with conversational and long tail keyword phrases that will be most relevant and similar to the questions your target audience will be asking. Your FAQ page should be well updated with conversational queries and their answers. When people search through voice, they give out more humanely commands rather than just keywords as they would otherwise do in typing their query.
The growth of voice search seems rampant, therefore, for a small business, where capital is very limited for marketing, investing time and efforts in incorporating voice optimization in the SEO strategy is the best compensation.
Coupon marketing
Coupons are one of the most sophisticated schemes of marketing. Compromising a little on your profit margin, you can draw in new customers by offering them discounted coupons. However, consistency while carrying out coupon campaigns is vital. It will be a safe bet to initially run a trial with different discount schemes on one product and evaluate the performance of each to find which brings you a greater number of customers.
The offer on your coupon should be very clear and concise. Customers tend to lose newly developed trust if they could not read a vital piece of information on the coupon because it was poorly printed or so earlier, and discover it at the time of purchase. They feel deceived. Furthermore, adding a shortened expiration date to your offer would excite the customers more as they fear losing a good deal to time.
A happy customer is bound to return and what will make them happy is a good discount. This works extremely well in building a reliable customer base.
Email marketing
To enhance the relationship with your credible buyers, Email marketing and business to business direct mail are the unmatched communicational option where you deliver what you want with no third person dependency. . Get your customers sign an email newsletter so that they can receive crucial information related to your brand like discount offers, new launches etc. Ask them for their feedback and suggestions. Your call to action must be strong. Consistent follow up emails are the crux of this campaign as they engage the customers in a positive way. The content should be a mix of updates and messages. The messages should be very human and real.