Smart Ways To Market Your Small Business On A Tight Budget

Small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult and expensive to market their products and services. As a result, business owners are always seeking ways to market their products and services that are less costly and still deliver the results they desire.

In this blog post, we discuss four (4) ways small business owners like you can smartly market their products or services effectively as well as tips for marketing your small business on LinkedIn.

Four (4) Smart Ways To Market Your Small Business

1. Marketing Research

Many small business owners don’t spend enough time researching the most effective way to market their products and services to their target audience.

They don’t ask enough questions and generally avoid researching because they think it’s unnecessary.

Market research can be a cost-effective way to promote your small business’ products and services. It can help you identify what your competitors are doing well, identify untapped customer demographics, and more. By conducting market research, you can gain valuable insights that can inform your marketing strategy and help you stay ahead of the competition.

You will be amazed at the insights you can gain from simple marketing research and how much money it can save your small business.

2. Collaborative Marketing (Co-marketing)

According to HubSpot, “Co-marketing is when two companies collaborate on promotional efforts for a co-branded offer. In a co-marketing partnership, both companies promote a piece of content or product and share the results of that promotion. By leveraging the relationship and reach of a partner, co-marketing campaigns are designed to deliver more leads, buzz, and awareness, with less work.”

The benefits of engaging in co-marketing are crystal clear. Your small business can reach more customers than it could have alone. The cost of the marketing campaign is shared between the participating businesses, making it possible for your business to reach more customers at a lower cost.

Consider hosting joint events, offering exclusive discounts to each other’s customers, or creating co-branded content to expand your reach.

But before launching your co-marketing campaign, research and choose a partner whose goals, audience, and reputation align with your small business.

3. Freely Share Something Of Value

Customers love free things. What that is might differ from business to business, but when done right, it is an effective strategy for marketing your products and services on a tight budget.

An example is distributing free samples of your product, giving limited access to your software or sharing valuable content in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, or social media content.

Freely offering something of value to your targeted customers will get them to come to you and you’ll be able to easily reach them and sell your products or services to them without spending a lot of money.

4. Optimise Your Digital Presence

Despite all the buzz around digital marketing, many small business owners still fail to grasp that it’s not just about gaining followers, posting frequently, or having a website. Rather, it’s about maximising the digital presence of your small business.

When potential customers search for products or services online, you want your small business to appear at the top of the results. This makes it easy for your small business to reach more people without spending a dime.

Achieving this requires basic search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to improve your social media and website’s visibility.

Your first steps should include conducting keyword research, optimising your social media posts, and your website content to rank for the keywords you choose, as well as making sure your site loads quickly.

LinkedIn Marketing

Tips For Marketing Your Small Business On LinkedIn

Every social media platform is different.

It is important to understand this before proceeding.

LinkedIn is unlike Instagram or Facebook, and success here is not dependent on spam messages or pushy sales techniques.

LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals, and for your strategy to work, you must approach it as a professional.

Here are a few tips that would get you started on your way to success on LinkedIn:

1. Set An Objective

You must know what you want to get out of marketing on LinkedIn.

Stating your objective would help guide your strategy as to what you want to achieve and how you would measure the success of your efforts.

Your objective can be to generate leads, or create awareness or become an authority in a niche.

Whatever your objective is, make sure it is clear.

2. Know Your Target Customer

Marketing on LinkedIn works best if you know who you are targeting from the start.

Define what your ideal customer looks like.

If you don’t have a clear picture of your customer, you can create a sketch by answering the following question:

A. Who would buy what we are selling?

B. Where are they located?

C. How much do they earn, what is their job title?

D. What are their pain points and who influences them etc.

The more information you have on your ideal customer, the better you can market to them on LinkedIn.

This is especially important because it helps you, narrow customers, via search by the roles, location etc.

3. Introduce Yourself

LinkedIn has a feature that lets you send a message to customers directly.

Now, you cannot just be first and just start sending messages to random people.

You have to research your customers and make sure they fit into your ideal customer profile before sending them a message.

Even then, you have to be careful how you introduce yourself and what you’re offering.

If you’re hard-selling, it’s usually a turn-off (remember what we said earlier).

Try to understand their challenges and present your products or service as a solution.

The more interactive and personalised it is, the better.

But then again, you can craft your message well enough and send it to a segment of customers that fit your customer criteria and have common challenges.

LinkedIn lets you send messages in bulk to up to 50 customers at once.

4. Follow-up

If you cannot allot time to follow-up customers who have indicated an interest in your product, you shouldn’t make the introduction in the first place.

Answer any question they may have, give a little nudge when they need it and get their details.

So that you can add them to your email list where you can continue to stay in touch.

5. Prioritise Quality Content

On LinkedIn, you can share content like articles, text, image, videos or slides.

This means more content types than other social media types.

Small business owners who want to succeed in marketing their business on LinkedIn should understand that more customers are approaching businesses instead.

This is called inbound marketing, and the quality of content you post and how relevant it is to them would determine if they choose you or your competitor.

So make sure your content brings value to your target customers when they come across it.

6. Advertise

Like Twitter or Facebook, you can advertise your business on LinkedIn.

This would help amplify your efforts and make you reach more customers on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn advertising includes sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, or Text Ads, etc.

Which offers small businesses more access to highly targeted customer sets.

7. Build A Network

LinkedIn is a social media platform and hence thrives on networking.

To build a network around your small business, you can start by optimising your LinkedIn profile and that of your employees (if possible, get them to engage with your posts too).

This would increase the visibility of your company page as it can be seen by anyone who interacts with your employees.

Beyond your employees, you can also interact with your suppliers, partners and others in your industry. This would also help increase your visibility.

Next, you can join various groups and communities that are formed around your niche or where your customers are.

The strategy here is to be as helpful as possible without hard-selling; this way they come to trust you for value and would like to learn more by interacting with your page.

With 700 million-plus members, LinkedIn is a great platform to market your small business whether it’s a B2C or B2B.

Hopefully, you take the few tips shared in this article and do the most important thing – EXECUTE.

3 Reasons Referral Marketing Is A Smart Way To Market Your Small Business

Word of mouth review is one of the most trusted review systems today. Simply because people tend to believe people they already trust. Statistics show that customers are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by friends.
And when you combine this information with the fact that most customers today don’t trust brands and hence disdain traditional advertising, you get a sense as to why many businesses are hopping on the referral marketing train.

Referral Marketing is a step higher than the natural process of word of mouth. It involves spreading the word about a product or service through a business’ existing customers, under a structure provided by the business.
With referral marketing, businesses can reward customers for referring others, increase their chances of getting customers via word of mouth and measure the results of their efforts.

There are many reasons your business needs to take referral marketing seriously but let’s discuss these 3 basic ones –

1. Return On Investment

There are many ways to market your business, but leveraging referral marketing simply a great investment. According to the New York Times, 65% or 2/3rd of new customers come from referral marketing. That’s results no other marketing campaign can guarantee. If you factor in the relatively lower cost it takes to run a referral campaign, then you get a sense of the huge return on investment your business can enjoy.

2. Generate Quality Leads

Many businesses have to comb through hundreds of leads to get a few qualified leads. But with referral marketing, one critical advantage is that it generates quality leads for your business without the stress. This also means that it ensures that a higher number of such leads go on to buy your products and services than leads generated from other forms of marketing. This is true for the simple reason that customers who refer others know those in their network who are the right fit for your business. Beyond this however, the Harvard Business Review reports that the lifetime value of a referred customer is 16 percent higher than that of non-referred customers. So, it’s a better deal all around.

3. Increased Marketing Reach

Referral marketing goes where traditional advertising cannot go. It filters into customer’s organic conversations via word of mouth or social media and reaches customers who disdain traditional ads and does it faster than any other form of advertising.

Now, what is keeping you from implementing referral marketing for your business? You can easily set up a referral marketing campaign with ease on your own or using a third party referral platform like Referral Candy. Whatever way you go about. Not implementing a referral marketing campaign would be a serious disadvantage to your business. It is a stress-free process that can run automatically, seriously think about it.

If you need help marketing your small business, contact us today.

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