It’s never been more crucial to cut through the noise and reach your target audience in today’s fiercely competitive market. But how can a small company compete with larger ones that have larger marketing budgets? In order to learn more about practical marketing strategies for small businesses, we spoke with Emma Rose Gallimore, author of Plan to Profit: The Essential Marketing Guide For Busy Business Owners.
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You might not have the marketing budget that major competitors like Sony, Apple, or Google do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish great things as a small business! You can have an impact on your audience without having a sizable marketing budget. In fact, there are times when the most budget-friendly marketing strategies are the most effective.
But what, specifically, are those low-cost marketing strategies? When you’re operating on a tight budget, how can you promote your business, grow brand recognition, and boost sales?
The following list of five marketing suggestions can help your company grow, regardless of how limited your budget may be:
01. Go skyscraper high with your content
You’ll want to share your skyscraper content on all of your social media channels once you’ve created it. Canva’s social graphics templates are easy to customise to fit your branding and content because they are already sized for each platform.
There aren’t many strategies as effective as content marketing when it comes to low-cost methods of generating leads and connecting with your audience.
The benefits of content marketing are twofold: you get to share your knowledge and position yourself as a go-to authority in your niche market, and your customers can access that knowledge before deciding to purchase your good or service.
“Content marketing works…because it gives the customer something valuable up front,” claims Emma. “Customers develop a sense of trust for you when you do content marketing well. They already received value from your content marketing, so it’s simple for them to think that your service or product will be worthwhile to spend money on.
But what was that key phrase? effectively using content marketing.
It won’t help your marketing to write a quick blog post that doesn’t really address any of your customers’ problems. You must offer your audience genuine value—and you must do it better than anyone else—if you want your content marketing to be successful.
What is the most effective way to accomplish that? The skyscraper approach.
The Skyscraper Technique enables you to pinpoint the content that is succeeding and then advance that content to produce results for your company.
The plan is straightforward: To start, you conduct some Google research to discover what content is dominating your sector or the search results for the keywords you’re attempting to rank for. When you are aware of what is currently successful, you can produce content that is similar but much more advanced. Make it longer, more in-depth, and more helpful—just make it superior to the content that is currently ranked number one overall.
Reach out to reputable websites that link to the original content and inform them that you have produced something superior once you have a piece of content that completely eclipses the original. Does contacting those websites require time and effort? Sure. But once they respond, you’ll have a tonne of high-quality sites directing traffic to your content, which will help you improve your SEO ranking, increase your visibility, and make it much simpler for potential customers to find you. So it’s time and effort well spent.
02. Try lead magnet content
Infographics are excellent lead-gen materials. You can quickly present your data in a way that is visually impactful by using one of Canva’s infographic templates, like this Business Infographic template, without investing a lot of time in the design process.
Skyscraper content creation is a fantastic content marketing strategy, but it’s not the only one that can yield significant business benefits.
A piece of content known as a lead magnet is one that you provide to your audience in exchange for their contact information, usually in the form of an email address. Lead magnets are incredibly powerful.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to lead magnets. Anything can make a great lead magnet, including ebooks, how-to guides, worksheets, templates, and swipe files. The only prerequisite is that it must be something that your target audience wants so badly that they’re willing to provide you with their email address in order to access it. This means that your lead magnet must be jam-packed with quantifiable value.
Gallimore, for instance, developed a workbook to aid business owners in understanding marketing as part of her plan to promote her book. Again, no matter how you look at it, this is a win-win situation. Gallimore gains credibility as an authority, her audience has access to a useful resource, and—most significantly—she is able to grow her email list of qualified prospects to whom she can continue to market in order to increase book sales.
Every industry, business type, and niche can benefit from using lead magnets. When done correctly, they produce an email list full of potential customers who fit your target market and who you can continue to market to in the future.
03. Use high-quality graphics to tell your story
Canva has the templates you need to make incredible designs that will advance your small business, whether you’re looking to design a logo, a social graphic, a web banner, or a marketing brochure. Canva is about the most cost-effective marketing strategy you can find because our templates are free.
Whatever industry you work in, there is probably fierce competition on the market. If you want people to notice your brand, it must visually appeal to them in order to stand out from the competition.
Or, to put it another way, you must spend money on quality design.
People can easily absorb your message with the help of good design. They are drawn to it and are forced to pause and take notice. A customer will spend more time with a well-designed graphic or website, just as a baby will gaze longer at a beautiful face (it’s true, look it up), claims Gallimore. “And you have a winning strategy when you combine good design with strong branding.”
In the past, companies that wanted to develop a visually striking brand had to either work with an agency or hire a designer. But those skills aren’t cheap; top-notch agencies and designers can set you back thousands of dollars each month, making them anything but inexpensive marketing strategies.
However, excellent design need not be expensive. If you know what resources to use, you can create a distinctive brand (and all the assets that go with it) without going overboard with your spending.
04. Start a social media conversation
A great way to engage your followers in conversation is to share messages of inspiration and powerful images. Before posting on the brand’s Instagram page, start with the Dream Sunset Instagram Post template and edit it with your own messaging.
The majority of brands focus exclusively on social media advertising, which can be both costly and effective.
Use social media to be social, or, in other words, take advantage of social media platforms to have direct conversations with your customers, if you want to use social media as a way to market your business without blowing your budget.
Select a few social media sites to concentrate on, then begin engaging in meaningful dialogue with your audience on each of those sites. Investigate the queries that your clients are posing on Quora and offer insightful, beneficial answers. Find the Facebook groups that are the most active in your industry, and become a resource there. Make Instagram a place where you interact with your customers directly.
Even on a tight budget, the secret to using social media effectively is to use it as a channel for direct customer interaction. Your customers will develop better relationships with you and be more inclined to want to do business with you if you engage in more natural conversations with them.
Building relationships is the best free way to improve your marketing…You don’t have to be selling all the time, says Gallimore. People will feel more at ease doing business with you and referring you to their friends and clients once they get to know you.
05. Get the most bang for your buck
Make the most of all your content and repurpose it across various platforms, including Pinterest, which can generate a lot of traffic, if you want to stretch your marketing budget. A great way to make your content stand out on Pinterest is to customise a Pinterest Graphic template, like this Brown Cookies Recipe Pinterest Graphic.
You should put a great marketing asset in front of your customers as soon as possible after creating it.
However, once it’s public, that’s it, right?
Wrong.
Take every marketing asset you produce, whether it’s a video, an infographic, or a lead magnet, and repurpose it as many times as you can if you want to get the most value for your money.
Have you created an ebook to attract leads? The content should be divided up and repurposed as a blog series. Putting together a video for your website? Live-stream a sneak peek on Facebook to pique interest in the finished product. Did you create a standout infographic? Post it on all of your social media channels, gather the data for a blog post, include it on your website, etc. You get the idea.
The key takeaway is that you must get the most value out of every marketing dollar you spend if you want to keep costs down. Don’t stop there when you devote time and money to producing something outstanding; instead, think creatively and come up with additional strategies you can employ to broaden your audience (and, in the process, boost sales).
Marketing can be effective and affordable
Effective marketing does not have to break the bank. All that’s left to do is get out there and start marketing now that you are aware of which low-cost marketing strategies can produce significant results on a tight budget.
