With the limited budget for marketing, most businesses think it’s impossible to promote their products or services today, especially if you’re owning a small enterprise with only a few employees on board. The good news is that, in fact, there are dozens of different marketing ideas you can boost your brand awareness and enhance your business performance even within the marketing budget.
Most enterprise owners today don’t have that much time to search for the different marketing approaches, identify whether or not those are effective exactly for your business, and identify the ways to implement each into your marketing strategy.
That’s why in this blog, we’ve covered some of the most effective marketing hacks that can fit nearly any business without surpassing its estimated budget. With these marketing ideas and tips implemented, you’ll be able to significantly enhance the product performance, as well as build a powerful marketing campaign within the shortest time frames that’ll benefit you for years.
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Effective Marketing Ideas for Enterprises with Tight Budget
No matter how great your brand is, it won’t succeed in the market without the right marketing strategy. The following marketing hacks can perfectly work for any business from nearly any scope and require minimal investments to get started.
Now, let’s review the marketing ideas and tips for small businesses and large enterprises you should certainly give a try today!
#1 Create Your Business Account in Google
Today, no one can imagine their life without eCommerce – a powerful channel that enables convenient trading on the Internet.
According to Statista, the number of digital buyers worldwide in 2021 has surpassed 2.14 billion people, which purchase various goods and services online. That’s almost 30% more, compared to the numbers for 2016.
For this reason, more and more businesses today start developing their online presence too, and some of them have already made it the top priority to focus on today. One of the very first steps that will help you to get started is creating an official business account on Google.
This method will help your business to be visible on searches and can greatly benefit reaching the local audience, as it will show up on Google Maps, the local section of Google Search, and the right-side Knowledge Panel for branded searches. And, because this method is totally free of charge, it’s literally impossible to find a more affordable way to market your business on the Internet.
#2 Invest In Developing a Website for Your Business
No matter if you own a large company or small business, creating a website for your business is no longer an option but a necessity nowadays. And, though this approach seems to be obvious, the most recent statistics show that more than 29% of small businesses don’t have a website so far.
In fact, developing a convenient website with essential information about the business and the products or services it offers is one of the best methods to enter the eCommerce market. Here are some reasonable statements on why you should launch a website for your business today:
- Audience engagement. A user-friendly website that features all the essential information your potential clients may need opens up a great chance to enlarge your audience and increase the number of your loyal customers. People across the globe can easily discover the goods or services your brand offers and easily make an order as well.
- Credibility. It’s no wonder that without developing a business website, it doesn’t exist. And, if Google cannot explain what the enterprise is doing or where it is located, the clients are less likely to trust it. Even a bunch of reviews about the overall impression from using certain products or services, that are published on Google, can significantly add more to your business credibility.
- Brand awareness. Another good reason for launching a website for your business is the ability to improve brand awareness. “By clearly establishing who you are, what you represent, and what you stand for, you increase the chances of your customers buying from you”, Forbes experts say.
- Organic traffic. One of the most valuable traffic sources the websites try to bring in to enhance their website rankings in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others. The better position your website has in SERP, the more people are able to find your website and, of course, purchase the products or services you have. Moreover, unlike referral and social media traffic, organic traffic doesn’t require regular investments, yet can generate high-quality leads for years as they’re relevant for users.
- Leads. Also, creating a website for your business increases the chances to draw customers which are interested in the type of products or services your business offers, and are much more likely to convert and turn into your loyal clients.
As you can see, a high-quality, functional, and user-friendly website today has become an integral part of any marketing strategy for nearly any business. It can significantly increase your audience, enhance their engagement and interaction with your brand and, of course, boost sales and benefit your business growth.
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#3 Promote Your Business on Social Media
The power of social media promotion cannot be overlooked as well. With more and more people starting purchasing goods and services on social media, running catchy marketing campaigns, and engaging influencers to promote the brands, it has become one of the most powerful channels for eCommerce.
Not only does it work great as an additional sales channel but also can be a perfect tool for building a community online and enhancing the brand interaction with your audience. And also, it doesn’t require any costs to create an Instagram page for your business, so you can easily build one within a few minutes. Also, creating an official page of your brand is a good chance to get closer with your audience, better understand their preferences and needs, as well as provide top-notch customer service. For instance, you can troubleshoot the possible issues, or get unbiased opinions about your brand and its products, etc.
To engage different audiences, it’s better to create pages on popular social media platforms that perfectly fit your customer persona model. As a rule, it includes platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and more.
However, it’s not just enough to create accounts for your brand on social media. It’s more important to post the valuable, engaging, catching content people would like to see in their feeds. Try to post different types of content, including articles, FAQs, videos, and pictures to convince your new subscribers to give your brand a try. At the same time, it’s a great chance to reach out to the loyal clients by, for instance, introducing the new products available, and establishing trustful relationships with your community as well.
Whatever your motivation, make sure you are regularly active and proactive on the social media accounts you create – creating dozens of accounts you can’t track is not the best option here, as it can play a trick on you and hurt the reputation of your business.
#4 Create the Engaging Content for Different Sources
Most marketing and SEO experts say that “Content is a King”, which means that unique, high-quality, interesting, and relevant content contributes significantly to the success of companies on the Internet. For this reason, it’s essential not only to create a website or register the business pages on social media to drive more audiences and generate conversions.
It’s much more important to develop first-class content for these sources to make people interested in your business and brand, as well as the products or services you’re offering.
For the website, it’s a great idea to post:
- FAQs about the products/services your business is offering
- Blog post series that cover the essential topics concerning the usage, tips and hacks, benefits and features of each of your products/services, as well as how they can help to resolve the pains of your potential customers.
- Engaging videos that introduce the strong sides of your brand, why it’s different and better for your business compared to the competitor products/services. Just turn on the imagination and try to put yourself in the shoes of your audience: what are their pains and needs, and how your products can help them.
For social media accounts, marketers suggest focusing on visual content, like videos and images, to promote your business accounts and increase audience engagement. As a rule, people don’t like to spend their time on long reads on social media, and the “six seconds” rule only proves that theory – it takes not more than six seconds to capture people’s attention before they make the next scrolling movement and tell the story before viewers move on. Because of that, you should put some effort into creating a
If you think that creating visual content is impossible without specific skills and tools, you’re wrong. Today, there are plenty of different tools for content creation that feature tons of different functions and editing options, and are totally free for use!
For instance, if you’re to create engaging content for YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, you should certainly give a try to a powerful video editor from Movavi. It features a wide range of tools that can help you to create awesome videos for nearly any purpose. Cut the shots, add background music, implement visual and audio effects, add subtitles, and more within a single app. Moreover, with a user-friendly interface and drag and drop feature, it will take less time to get started and make your first video ready for sharing!
#5 Develop a Powerful Email Marketing Strategy
Another on-budget solution you should not overlook even with the tight budget is email marketing. According to Hubspot, there are 4 billion daily email users and nearly all of them can become your potential clients if your products are relevant to them. Here’s where email marketing comes into play.
Simply put, email marketing is a cost-saving method used to get more new visitors engaged with your business, as well as maintain relationships with existing customers. Though this approach is considered to be one of the earliest that appeared in the Internet marketing scope, it’s still the proven way to achieve a strong return on your marketing investments. Basically, that’s the reason why 64% of small businesses use email marketing in their strategies!
To ensure your strategy works, it’s essential that the emails from your brand or business:
- Feature creative, appealing subject lines
- Narrates the style of your brand, including colors, website design, fonts, and manner of speech.
- Provide the unique value proposition (UVP) to its target audience and encourage readers for a deeper interaction such as, for instance, browsing the sales category or learning a certain product’s characteristics.
In addition, it’s also important to work on email marketing improvement:
- Run A/B tests to see which copy works best
- Encourage new website visitors to get subscribed by offering a bonus content piece or coupon/discount
- Slowly nurture your subscribers via email until they are ready to become paying customers, and many more
With the right strategy in mind, it’s more than possible to get the additional source of high-quality leads, which is critical for any of today’s businesses.
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#6 Start a Blog with the Useful Content & Keep It Relevant
According to recent research by WordPress, over 409 million people today review nearly 20 million blog posts each month, which makes it one of the most powerful tools to enhance your marketing campaign with a tight budget. Through blogging, businesses can easily reach the target audiences, provide a more personal experience to existing and potential customers, show their expertise in a certain field, and many more.
A well-planned blogging strategy can also:
- Generate tons of free organic traffic to your website
- Act as a great source of high-quality leads that convert
- Share some more information about the brand, what it does, etc.
- Feature as a direct line of communication with your audience and create an engaging, interactive experience for them
Nevertheless, not all the content can really benefit your business development on the market. To make it really valuable and useful for both your audience and business, yet to help it stand out from the competitors, you should make it EAT-able. Introduced by Google in 2018, this concept stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and is considered to be the only factor Google search engine uses to evaluate the overall quality of a web page and content published there.
Best Marketing Practices that Require a Little More Budget
If you’ve allocated some budget for marketing and need some solutions that can enhance your business performance, here are the most effective hacks you should definitely give a try!
#7 Develop Your Logo
Your logo represents your brand but it’s not your brand, instead, it represents your business’ personality through color, logo fonts, and design. Simply put, it can be described as similar to the clothes you’re wearing – it’s not you, but it reveals your character and personality to others.
For nearly all the small businesses today, creating catchy logos matters too! With the great logo, your brand can:
- Make the right first impression on your business
- Get better recognition among large audiences
- Enhance the client loyalty and build appreciation for it
- Build trust in your business and easier communication with your audiences
- Prove your expertise and professionalism
- Uncover your business identity
- Create an emotional connection with the audiences
- Set itself apart from other competitors within the single field
- Raise the expectations towards its products or services
As you can see, investing in a professional logo for your business is surely worth it in the long run. The sooner it is built, the more likely people notice you among thousands of other businesses.
To get you inspired and motivated to invest in logo creation, try to imagine Apple’s products without the apple or Nike trainers without their swoosh, or the Twitter logo without the white bird on a blue background. See, everything – from the shapes to colors matters when it comes to creating a logo and making it recognizable on the market. However, you might be surprised to discover that the well-recognized Nike swoosh cost just $35, and the first Twitter logo – only $15.
So, creating a powerful logo today is of the essence, even for small businesses.
#8 Implement the SEO Best Strategies
You have already heard about some of the local SEO methods such as registering your business account on Google and developing the eCommerce website to become visible to search engines. However, it’s not enough to simply create a website to get more traffic from organic searches: whatever field your business operates in, you’ll more than surely face severe competition for the customers’ loyalty and money.
According to the recent studies by Sistrix, the top 5 ranking results generate nearly 63.2% of clicks on average. For this reason, it is important for businesses to improve their website rankings to get more traffic and, of course, successfully convert it into the sales
Luckily, there are plenty of other advanced practices for improving the website ranking in SERP. The simplest and least costly option will be to hire a content creator with SEO skills and start regularly publishing high-quality content that is optimized for search. You can go beyond the borders to find professionals in this field by hiring contractors as freelancers, and this would give you a higher number of options to choose a good candidate with the required skills. Usually, small businesses use blogging to:
- Drive more traffic to their websites
- Enhance online presence
- Promote their products or services on the Internet (for free!)
- Create the relevant content that will generate leads for years
- Post some useful information that your potential clients are seeking out
By targeting different topics for each post and with the right keywords used, it’s more than possible to get your website onto the top rankings in search and generate high-quality traffic for free.
Another good way to run small business SEO is to hire an SEO expert, or even a team of experts that will help you to make up a powerful website optimization strategy, define the goals, evaluate the progress, and many more. Of course, it can cost much more than blogging expenses, but will surely work more effectively for long-term business development. After all, with more pages appearing on the top ranking positions for relevant queries, your website can benefit for years by receiving tons of free traffic.
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#9 Run Contests, Giveaways, or Donate a Prize
Any social media contest or giveaway is a smart and effective method to promote your business with minimal spending. You may need to invest in a prize or offer the product/ service that will convince your subscribers and potential customers to participate. This method not only improves audience engagement but can also become a proven method of getting more leads.
Even if you’re tight on budget, it’s still possible to drive more attention to your contest by offering some extraordinary gifts or coupons, or any other gift that is worth competing for. Moreover, with the variety of different social media content types, it’s not a big problem to set up the one that effectively works for your business. After all, the core idea of each is to encourage registrants to follow, tag your business or share it to get its products or services introduced to other potential clients.
However, it’s highly important to also develop the business account on social media before announcing the giveaway to minimize the bounce rate and convince your audience to stay once the contest is over.
#10 Create a Referral Campaign for Your Business
Another proven marketing method that requires minimal investments and can ideally fit nearly any business is creating a referral program for your customers. In fact, the existing customers can also help you to promote your business through word-of-mouth, and it’s often considered to be even more powerful than the other marketing hacks used.
Some great ideas for creating a referral program include:
- Offering free products to customers
- Providing discounts for referring new clients
- Supplying a free month of service
If you’re uncertain about the efficiency, feel free to analyze the giant enterprises like YouTube, Spotify, or Netflix to see how these companies promote their services for new clients with referral programs. Or else, a great way to understand how you can build a referral program specifically for your brand is to learn more about the referral programs featured by your competitors!
#11 Make Use of Fairs, Special Events, and Shows
For those who’re looking for offline marketing approaches, we can suggest participating in different local events or contests to promote your business. Of course, it won’t target that large audience as the online marketing method, but it’s still a great chance to introduce your business on a local level.
As an example for the brands that feature some goods or specific products for sale, if the city in which your business is located hosts certain annual celebrations, weekly farmers markets, or any other related contests or events – make it a point to attend those to get to know your local audience! Not only can you offer the products for sale, but also provide live testimonials for the different types of products to the local residents and easily convert them into loyal clients that convert.
In addition, that can be a perfect chance to conduct market research and get to know your target persona better – one of the most valuable aspects of building the right strategy for your business.
Wrapping Up
To sum up, the marketing ideas described above can become a perfect way for businesses from any scope to boost their performance, even with a limited marketing budget! Nearly all these hacks have already been implemented and successfully tested with hundreds of thousands of different enterprises across the globe, so you can be assured of their efficiency.
Already found the one that perfectly fits your business requirements and goals? Give it a try and get impressive results from your campaign from day one!