Marketing on a Budget
There are a variety of options for where and how to market your business. However, not all of them will be the most effective use of your time so it’s always important to keep you customer in mind while making your marketing plan.
If you haven’t already, put together a buyer persona, like we talked about in this blog post. This will help you identify what channels your target audience uses to gather information and will guide your marketing efforts to better reach them. After you put together your buyer personas, here are a couple low-cost marketing options for you to consider.
Press Releases
Press releases are a great way to get your message in front of your potential audience. Media sources are always looking for interesting stories and I’m sure your new business has a story behind it. Click here for some tips from SCORE on how to write a good press release.
You can also see examples of press releases at PR Newswire, PR Web, or BusinessWire.
Local Online Listings
I like to say that if something doesn’t doesn’t exist online, it doesn’t exist. As mentioned in my last blog post, it’s important to have accurate and complete listings on Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and Yelp for Business. This will help get local traffic into your storefront.
You can also send requests to review your business to your loyal customers that you know will be advocates for you.
Professional Website
Even if you don’t have the budget for someone else to build a website for you, there are several drag-and-drop website builder options available to you, such as Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace.
When you write the content for your website, make sure you use keywords and phrases that your target audience uses when talking about or searching for similar products or services. This will help search engines match up your website to web searches.
Blog Posts
Having a blog on your website that you post on regularly will help keep your content fresh and add relevant keywords for search engines to notice and direct traffic your way. Blog posts can also be shared on your social media channels and, if people think the content is useful, interesting, funny, etc. there’s a higher chance they will share it with their friends.
Video Content
You don’t have to have a huge budget to create videos. You can record a video using a smartphone or the webcam on a laptop. Remember to keep it short (30 seconds to 2 minutes is the average), engaging, and informative. You could also try re-purposing your blog posts by creating videos from them. You can learn more about using video as a marketing tool here.
Whatever marketing method you choose, plan it out beforehand and take the time to review how it’s going regularly, then adjust as needed. If you need help planning out your marketing strategy or evaluating your results, schedule a free appointment with our business consultant.
Check back next week for more low-cost marketing tips!
Valkyrie Johnson