Effective Budget-Friendly Marketing Ideas

Cost effective marketing that can make you viral!

Small businesses usually work on a small budget and apart from budget, there are other concerns of resources and time. Hence, SMEs need cost-effective marketing ideas that can help get the word out to their customers in the best possible budget. Depending on your target audience, digital media is a saviour when it comes to low-cost effective marketing ideas. Here are 5 such strategies that can help small businesses build their brand

1. Use Social Media Extensively

• Use Facebook and Instagram effectively, they are free of cost and organic marketing can help create awareness about your brand. You can also explore paid marketing with them to boost your reach to the target group. Nurture your consumers through Facebook groups and Instagram Stories
• Create great content that can help build communities around your brand. Be creative, use innovative ways to connect and build a loyal customer base For e.g. From 1990-2009, Harley Davidson purely built their community by producing great content around the brand which made the bike an aspirational product and changed the fortunes for the company
• Use more of videos, infographics & pictures to hook the customer when talking about your brand or any offer
• Carry online contests- Spend some money on a good price because the number of participants and the potential leads you get is worth every penny spent

2. Turn your customers into your Brand Ambassadors

• Make the customer feel special so that he becomes the ambassador of your brand and this can be done by providing certain memories to them that they would like to hold on to and carry with them
• Give them T-shirts, laptop stickers, notebooks, basically things they use in daily life
• Use can use social media to take an opinion poll on new deigns they would like to see and perhaps reward the winning design. This will help them engage with you as an effective marketing idea 

3. Focus on SEO Strategies

• Investment into SEO is not much but is a cost-effective marketing idea to get target customers
• In search engine optimization, you need to choose the targeted words that can increase your search possibilities and divert traffic to your website
• For example, if you have a business named Gagan Dry Cleaners in Lajpat Nagar, Delhi, you will develop content across your platforms that focus on the keyword Lajpat Nagar + dry cleaners. It will help draw potential customers looking for dry cleaners in that area.

4. Build an easy to navigate Website

• Another cost-effective marketing idea is to build a website. Having a website with an easy to navigate approach is a must for a small business as part of its marketing mix
• Your website should contain all the important information about your products & services, how to reach you, contact details and a tracker of your location
• Use your website smartly to put amazing content that makes it a must-visit for the customer

5. Sponsor Local Events

• There are many events that happen locally and sponsoring such events is an effective marketing idea to get your business in front of local patrons
• Sponsoring an event opens doors for networking with other businesses, which can lead to fruitful partnerships going ahead
• Since local events are always looking for sponsors, it would be easy to negotiate on the pricing.

Always keep an eye out for cost-effective marketing ideas, because the only way to make an impact today is to think differently. Spend time, not money to devise a strategy that works best for your company.