How do you get your business or brand out there with a small or limited marketing budget? In this article  we will be discussing ten tips for marketing on a tight budget.

1. Understand Who Your Customer Are

Making sure you have a strong understanding of the different types of customer your business/product/service attracts is vital to maximising your efficiency when marketing on a tight budget.

Buyer Personas are a great method of working out who your different types of customers are. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

2. Have A Strong Visual Brand

Branding within your business is essentially the identity of your business. When creating a brand consider the following; 

• How do you want the brand to look and feel?
• What do you want it to portray?
• How do you want to be perceived?

Having a strong visual identity as part of your brand is critical as most people remember visuals rather than a spiel about why your brand is the best. You want to formulate a visual brand and colour scheme which builds familiarity and trust

Make sure once you have developed this brand you insert it wherever possible; in emails, in promotional material and wherever you conduct your business.

3. A Consistent Promotional Message

Making sure your brand is the same across all channels and in all your marketing material is critical. If you have content with different messages you may end up with the wrong type of customer.

Whereas if you have strong branding with a consistent message will attract the right kind of customers.

4. A “Story” To Raise PR Awareness

 Throughout the course of history, before writing people connected with stories. This is still the case in business today, people want to give their business to someone who they can trust. How do you convey this if they don’t know you though? Through your story.

By letting prospects know where you have come from or what obstacles you have overcome in your business journey they are more easily able to relate to you and a connection can be formed.

5. Using A Database To Manage All Your Contacts

Using a database system can help you save loads of time with your marketing and sales efforts. A CRM system is a customer relationship management system which is software used to track all your sales and marketing efforts.

Using a CRM system can help you save loads of time with your marketing efforts. This will help you track the progress of leads as they move towards becoming clients.

6. Segment Your Contacts

While using a CRM to organise your contacts can have a massive difference on your marketing. Simply by organising your contacts based off the buyer persona or industry or job title you can better tailor the content towards those people.

By using a CRM to organise your contacts you can better delegate your time and schedule business meetings more efficiently. For example, if you organise your contacts by region you can schedule multiple business meetings in the same area if you are going to be in that region.

7. Thank Your Customers

Building loyalty with your regular customers and recognising those who repeatedly purchase from you is a nice simple endorsement for your customer that shows you reward loyalty and care about your customers.

Offering discounts for repeat customers or gift cards to those who give referrals is a great way to build the relationship and generate new leads and prospects.

8. Outsource Low Value Tasks

Outsourcing menial or time consuming tasks to Fiverr, Upwork or another low cost service is a great way to maximise your time while ensuring simple day to day tasks are still completed.

By using these third-party services, you open up your business to a whole new class of professionals with skills to grow your business.

9. Facebook Advertising

Facebook Video Advertising is also a fantastic way to grow your business on a limited budget. By having effective marketing material delivered directly to your most likely potential customers you can develop prospects at a much faster rate.

Facebook offers a whole suite of options for those wishing to advertise within Facebook. With Facebooks targeted advertising you can set the budget exactly to what you want and to the exact type of prospect you are looking for.

10. Asking Users to Find Out What They Want

For example, if you survey 20 users and they all have difficulty navigating your website you then know it might be time to simplify the website.

By surveying users, you can also find common criticisms or complaints your customers have and use your time to plug up those holes or fix those problems.