It’s often challenging to run effective marketing campaigns if you have limited in-house resources and a small budget.
The good news is, it’s possible to market your business online even on a shoestring budget.
Digital marketing is affordable when you apply the right cost-efficient strategies and know the best ways to make a massive impact with your marketing efforts without having to break the bank.
This guide covers five low-budget tactics to help you market your products, brand, and business and make the most of your marketing resources.
Table of Contents
1. Implement engaging email marketing campaigns
On average, email marketing can get you a return of $42 for every dollar you spend, making email marketing one of the best tactics to get excellent returns with minimum investment.
When implemented properly, email marketing can help you reach your target audiences and engage your new leads.
You can also nurture and build relationships with your prospective and current customers through compelling email marketing campaigns, such as newsletters, to ultimately increase your conversions and sales.
Create email marketing campaigns around your promotions and include links to relevant content, such as blog posts and ebooks that your subscribers find valuable.
Besides creating engaging email content, add a touch of fun to your messages and campaigns by learning how to make cool emails in Outlook.
Use some of the best Outlook signature templates from Wisestamp to easily create your email signatures.
Choose a template and customize the design, details, and other elements accordingly, and you’ll have an eye-catching Outlook email signature.
A signature is a great element to add to your email marketing campaigns. It can help humanize your brand while keeping it professional and credible.
With this, you can connect with your email contacts better, and the best part is, you won’t need to spend too much money to achieve this.
2. Publish compelling blog posts
While creating blog posts can cost you a bit of time, it usually doesn’t require too much money to make.
Create and publish blog posts as a cost-efficient strategy to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts while providing value to your target audiences.
The higher your content quality is, the better chances of improving your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) ranking organically. This can boost your brand’s search visibility and, in turn, your conversions and sales opportunities.
Write about topics that resonate with your target audience and address their questions and pain points.
Research relevant topics using Google Trends. Enter your keyword or search term, and the tool gives you insights into user search interest over time and related topics and queries (among others).
Once you know which topics your audiences are interested in, create blog posts such as numbered lists, industry best practices, collections of the best tips, etc.
Try to mix up your content and include images and videos to your blog post, such as tutorials and product demos.
Publish your blog posts on your website and promote them via your marketing channels such as email and social media.
3. Join online communities
Connect with other business leaders and experts in your industry through online communities. It’s an often free and excellent way to network with other members, build relationships, form future business partnerships, and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
For instance, Growthnation by Mapplinks Academy, a private growth marketing community on Facebook, allows members to discuss and share tips, ideas, and experiments to help improve their growth marketing efforts together.
As a member, you’ll have access to growth marketing tactics, including fundamental and related digital marketing content.
Through online marketing communities, you can learn the best strategies to implement paid and organic digital marketing, data-based marketing and analytics, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), A/B testing, and many other topics.
This helps you learn and improve your current marketing strategies and plan your future tactics without burning a hole through your pockets.
4. Gather customer reviews
Shoppers take customer reviews seriously since these can serve as personal recommendations from friends and family.
Data even shows that positive reviews make 91% of customers more likely to patronize a business.
Leverage the power of customer reviews by displaying them on your website and product pages.
Establish a review management workflow to ensure you don’t miss any mentions and reviews of your brand online.
Set up a Google alert (which is free to do) and create a Google My Business profile or an account on other major review websites.
From your Google My Business account, request reviews by creating and sharing a link specific to your business that your customers can click to leave reviews.
Reply to reviews to encourage customers to leave more in the future and give you some ideas about what they like (or don’t like) about your products and services.
Reviews can help draw more traffic to your website and encourage visitors to act on your conversion goals, such as subscribing to your email list and purchasing your products and services.
Customer reviews can also boost your brand’s credibility, helping you build trust with your potential buyers and even improve your SEO efforts.
5. Run referral programs
Offer incentives to customers who leave positive reviews or refer other people to your brand. It’s an inexpensive way to generate new and qualified leads.
Run referral programs that encourage customer participation and help you gain more referrals by:
- Providing discounts to customers who bring in a specific number of referrals
- Rewarding customers with free services or products after a number of their referrals become paying customers
- Implementing giveaways for customers who refer the most number of people within a certain period
Use online marketing tools such as Vyper to create and run your referral and ambassador programs.
You can create and customize your program’s landing (or sign up) and Thank you pages and set up your campaign settings.
You can also track and analyze your referral program and gain insights into your conversion rate, how “viral” your campaign was, and its social engagement and revenue (among others).
A referral program is an affordable way to stimulate prospect engagement, raise awareness about your brand, and generate new leads through gamification and incentivization.
Start leveraging low cost marketing tactics today
While digital marketing generally requires a huge investment of your time and resources, not all your marketing tactics need to be costly to work well.
With a little creativity and thinking outside the box, you can run several marketing tactics to support your main strategies that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Follow the tips in this guide and see which ones work best for your business while optimizing your limited marketing budget and resources.