How to Promote Your Small Business on a Tight Budget

“You have to spend money to make money”. This has long been an understanding shared throughout the business community. While there’s certainly an amount of truth to it, there is no need to spend beyond your means on marketing and promotion.

If you are on a tight budget and facing the challenge of finding free or affordable methods to promote your business and expand your enterprise, here are 6 tips that can get you started.

1. Set up an ad campaign

While PPC (pay-per-click) advertising isn’t free, it is a perfect marketing strategy for small businesses. The strength of a PPC campaign isn’t so much in the amount of money you put in, but the quality of the text ad and accuracy of keyword targeting.

If you decide to set up a PPC campaign for your small business, you should also consider creating a landing page to improve your ads’ performance.

2. Go local

A great way to attract attention from potential clients is to offer them an incentive in the shape of a limited offer based on their location. If you are a locally-run small business, you can utilise several online platforms that cater to local communities.

Online directories offer businesses the possibility to market directly to their local target audience. Based on their technologies, these platforms will be able to direct your offers exactly to relevant clients.

3. List your business on prominent online spots

Local directories and online listings are great places to promote your business for several reasons:

• It’s easy – you just need to submit a link and enter your details.
  
  
• It’s almost always for free.
  
  
• Many of these websites have large numbers of visitors and advanced searching technologies, so they can actually direct traffic based on a specific query that is relevant to you.
  
  
• It also gives you valuable SEO juice to have your link posted on as many sites as possible.

4. Start a powerful marketing newsletter

Newsletters are one of the best methods for keeping visitors interested in your offerings. They are also helpful in generating new traffic. How? Think about it this way. One of your great emails lands in the inbox of a person who previously visited your website and is therefore listed to your newsletter. If the content of your email is appealing and enticing, the viewer can easily share this information with friends, either by forwarding or by clicking on the social sharing buttons that you (surely) will add to your newsletter.

This is the power of online “word of mouth” and it’s definitely one of the most effective tools you have for expanding your business activity.

5. Design an SEO-smart website

None of the above mentioned tips is helpful unless you have a great SEO- smart website to refer visitors to. Your business needs an online presence, a spot on the world wide web where interested customers can learn about your service and interact with you.

6. Be innovative and think outside the box

The tips listed here are universal and apply to pretty much any sort of business. However, you are the person who knows your target audience better than anyone else and you have the power to explore further marketing possibilities that are unique to your niche.

Spend some time researching the consumer and web usage habits of your potential clients. Where do they hang out? What do they search for on Google? What is their estimated budget? How can your service offer them valuable solutions? Answering these questions will also lead you to new possibilities.

So stay updated and always on the hunt for new directions for affordable and effective marketing opportunities.

SOURCE: Wix