Every business needs to do marketing for its products and services. But every organization does not necessarily have the funds to do so. Many companies develop marketing strategies that you can implement on a limited budget. Even companies with a high bank balance don’t like to dump all their funds into marketing without careful planning. They need to keep funding for other business departments and operations as well.
There are ways to do marketing on a budget. In the digitized times we live in today, marketing expenses have been significantly reduced due to many cost-effective marketing platforms. Gone are the days when you had to spend tons of money to show an ad on television because you did not have many other media options that offered lower rates.
Once you grow your business, you can look into the more costly means of marketing to broaden your reach. But in the beginning, you can adapt to the low-cost advertising methods and still get the results you want.
If you want to learn cheap ways to market your business, you have come to the right place. In this post, we will be discussing how to do marketing on a small budget.
10 Low-Budget Marketing Methods
Here are ten relatively low-budget marketing ideas.
1. Create and Distribute Videos
Making videos has become a lot cheaper than ever before. Some video-making experts offer their services at low rates on freelance websites. You can create simple explainer videos, animation videos, live footage videos, or slideshows at low costs to promote your business. You don’t even need to hire a full-time professional for it.
There are even video-making software or tools available that you can use on a monthly subscription. If you take out some time, you can learn how to use these tools and start making videos to promote your brand on your own. This way you won’t have to spend money at all on your video marketing. All you need to do is spend some time and familiarize yourself with the tools.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Since videos can easily be shared on various digital platforms, including social media, they are an excellent means of marketing on a budget.
2. Make Use of Infographics
Making infographics is free and easy, and thus they are a good way of marketing on a budget. You need to make sure that the design comes out neat so that the reader can clearly understand the information you are giving out.
Visuals are generally easier to comprehend and more appealing to read. Infographics are a combination of text and visuals and thus can deliver great amounts of information more effectively.
Image taken from Strikingly
Are you wondering how to use infographics for marketing? If you include infographics in your website content, other sites will probably copy and use them to improve their web content. When they do that, they would have to link back to the source, that is, to your website. This will give backlinks to your site and boost its search rankings. As a result, you will end up getting more traffic to your site. Hence it’s proven that using infographics is a good low-budget marketing technique.
3. Produce High-Quality Content
Content marketing is the most cost-effective means of marketing. It is a method of marketing on a budget that can do wonders for your brand in the long run. But merely writing and publishing any content doesn’t cut it. You need to produce high-quality and SEO-friendly content to be able to reap the benefits.
Although this should be obvious, many businesses produce sub-par content and publish it on their website. Then they wonder why their content marketing is not working out. Businesses need to learn the necessary SEO strategies to get them a return on their content creation efforts.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you can produce high-quality content, publishing it on the internet is free. Whether you create content for your website, your social media pages, your Youtube channel, or other blogs as guest posts, publishing it does not cost you any money. Posting tons of quality content across the internet is a fantastic means of marketing on a budget.
4. Use Social Media Influencers
Social media platforms are awesome for getting your marketing content to go viral. Due to the shareability of social media sites, your posts created to promote your brand have a high chance of spreading across large audiences.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
When you post something on your brand’s social media page, they can easily share it on their social media profile if your followers like it. This puts it in front of many more eyeballs, as all of this user’s friends can share the post on their timeline. If your content is good, this can snowball effect, causing your post to become popular in just a matter of hours.
Social media influencers are individuals who have a large following on a particular social media platform. For example, if an Instagram user with 100,000 followers agrees to share your content on their profile in exchange for a few dollars, you can get this reach of 100k people at a meager price. That’s one of the most efficient low-cost advertising methods.
5. Send Out Newsletters Regularly
If you have a subscription form on your website, it can be a great means of collecting email addresses to build an email list. Once you have a long enough email list, you can start sending newsletters to your subscribers. You can give out different kinds of information in these newsletters, such as the latest industry trends, your product updates, any new product launch announcements, upcoming sales offers, and more.
Using newsletters to keep your subscribers and customers reminded about your brand is a suitable method of marketing on a budget. It costs you almost nothing to create and send newsletters unless you use an email management tool at a monthly subscription to automate your email marketing.
6. Recycle Old Content
If you are low on your budget and time but want to continue with your content marketing efforts, you can even take your old content and recycle it to get more benefit from it. You’ll need to be creative enough to be able to do such low-budget marketing.
When you recycle your old content, you are making it fresh, updated, and more attractive. Using old content does not mean copying your old blog articles and pasting them into a new blog page. It means curating your already published content, selecting a few pieces out of it, editing and updating the text, changing the images, rephrasing the paragraphs, combining with other forms and integrating with new links, and then republishing it.
Although this might sound like a lot of work, it will take less than producing entirely new content. The best thing is it won’t cost you any money at all. Hence, it is an effective method of marketing on a budget.
7. Encourage User-Generated Content
Another way of marketing on a budget is to encourage your users to generate content for you. You can do this by running contests that your customers participate in. In the process, they will be required to share the contest link with their friends and peers, giving your campaign a free-of-cost reach to thousands of people.
This is one of the low-cost advertising methods where your customers help you spread your word because you commit to rewarding them.
8. Launch a Referral Program
This low-budget marketing method is similar to the one mentioned in the previous point. In referral marketing, you give an incentive to your customers to recommend your product or brand to their friends. Every time a new customer purchases your subscription or product, you reward the one who recommended your business to them. It’s like a win-win situation for both parties and doesn’t cost anybody a single dollar. The reward that you give comes from the sales revenue generated by the new customer. It is, therefore, a fabulous way of marketing on a budget.
9. Take Advantage of Guest Posting Opportunities
Guest posting is an excellent way to enhance your website’s search rankings, put out your content in front of many people, and build up a professional network with people from the same industry. Making guest posts can go a long way to promote your business. Since it does not cost you a thing, it is included in the effective strategies of marketing on a budget.
10. Broadcast Live
This one is free of cost, but all you need for this is confidence. Unless you pay a professional broadcaster to do this job for you, you’ll have to build the courage to speak live about your brand and promote your business to the public.
These days several different platforms offer free broadcasting features for businesses to use. You can broadcast live on your Facebook page or your YouTube channel. Once the live broadcast is over, the video will stay there for others to watch who visit the page later. If you do this right, this could be the most effective method of marketing on a budget.
How a Website Built on Strikingly Helps You to do Marketing on a Budget?
Image taken from Strikingly
If you build a site on Strikingly, you can use several features to apply these reduced-budget marketing ideas.
- You can embed videos on your web pages.
- You can add a blog to your site and publish quality content on it regularly.
- You can do social media marketing and integrate your website with your social media pages.
- You can create a subscription form and build an email list to send newsletters.
Our goal on Strikingly is to provide and support with as many user-friendly tools to help you grow your business at a steady pace. Creating a website on Strikingly is itself a means of doing marketing on a budget, as we help you save the cost and time of hiring a full-time programmer to do the job for you.
Besides, we like to take care of the technical side of our users’ websites, so that they can focus on the actual operations and sales of their business. If you choose us as your website building platform, we will work with you as a team to ensure that your website is equipped with all the features that you need, and that it runs smoothly and error-free.
