Brands, Customer Marketing, Social Marketing

No Budget? 7 affordable & low-cost marketing strategies and ideas

The Basics for affordable marketing campaigns: Most businesses have a tight or no budget to work with, which can make promoting your brand a challenge. The good news is, there are plenty of low-cost marketing strategies and affordable marketing ideas for you to market your brand to potential customers without spending any (or much) money. If you’re looking for no or low budget ideas, check out the cheapest (but effective) marketing strategies.

Here’s a TL;DR of affordable and the cheapest marketing strategies:

  1. Be on Social Media
  2. Freebies
  3. Enter Contests
  4. Launch a Referral Program
  5. Get Your Customers to Talk About You
  6. Write a Blog & Tighten Up Your SEO
  7. Get Great Reviews

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies – Affordable Marketing Campaigns

A low-cost marketing strategy is a way for businesses to use the cheapest marketing strategies that have a low impact on their budget, but great results. This allows them to focus their funds on other important business areas while still generating leads and getting their brand out there with affordable marketing campaigns.

While it is important to focus on building the product, gaining customers, and validating your business idea, brands should also put some time aside for marketing purposes.

The sooner you start marketing your brand, the more time you will have to get it out there and increase awareness of your company.

But first… Get the basics right.

Before you get started with the low budget campaigns, it’s worth taking the time to make sure you’ve got the basics of your marketing strategy in place. You need to understand your unique selling proposition and “elevator pitch”.

Your unique selling proposition is the attribute that makes your business stand out from the crowd. It may be a special feature or service that only you offer, or just an approach to working that sets you apart. The “elevator pitch” is a quick, compelling description of your company that highlights your unique selling proposition and makes your business attractive for potential customers.

Once you have these basics in place, you can now start designing and implementing these cheap but extremelly cost effective marketing ideas.

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7 Low Budget Strategies and Affordable Marketing Campaigns

So let’s get started with the cheapest marketing strategies that won’t destroy your marketing budget.

Be on Social Media

Being present in social media and building a community online is a free way to grow your business while expressing your brand’s personality and building trust with your audience.

You can:

  • Promote your blog posts, which drive traffic to your website.
  • Directly dialogue with followers to express your brand voice and garner more engagement.
  • Run polls and request feedback.
  • Take excerpts from longer forms of content and create quick and informational posts that are easier to digest.

Whatever your motivation, make sure you are regularly active and proactive on the social media accounts you create.

Freebies

How can giving freebies be a cheap marketing strategy? Firstly, no one would ever reject freebies. So, this will be a smarter move to attract potential new customers. Also, no one is expecting from you to offer something that is not affordable for you and in return, you will be getting pottentially more leads, visibility, increase customer loyalty and sales. Here is what you can give:

  • Free trials for a couple of days
  • Discount vouchers or promo codes
  • Few of the samples of your product/feature
  • 1-day premium login

Network and Enter Contests, Rankings & Competitions

Using social media and building up your digital networks is important, but don’t forget about traditional “face-to-face” networking as well.

Networking is key. After all, it’s one of the fastest, easiest and most effective ways to build meaningful relationships that can help grow your business. If you haven’t already, then you need to join face-to-face networking groups in your community. But marke sure you have your “elevator pitch” ready.

Also, it’s common for industries and organizations to have business contests & awards, such as “Best Restaurant” or “Best Customer Service.” This not only generates some free buzz for your business, if you win, you can place a badge on your site or storefront to boost your credibility.

Launch a Referral Program

Once you have a group of loyal customers, you can use that to your advantage by creating a referral program. If your current audience is happy with what they’re receiving from your company, they’re probably willing to share it with their friends and family.

The key here is to give something away to your customers for referring people to your company. This can be a percentage of their next purchase, free shipping, or even just 10% of the product cost.

You’ll have to gauge what will work best for your brand and current audience, but by showing that you care about them, you’re more likely to get positive word-of-mouth referrals.

Get Customer-Generated Content

Customer-generated content (CGC) like promotional social media posts and videos made by your followers and influencers are excellent at promoting your brand in an organic and authentic way.  CGC has a high trust rating, as its real people voicing real opinions.

Consumers trust other consumers. That’s why user-generated content is such an effective marketing strategy. Chances are that a lot of your customers feel connected to your business, and curating customer-generated content is a fun, powerful way to establish reciprocity in that connection.

Chech these ideas to Launch your Customer Generated Content Campaign

Get Great Reviews

A massive percentage of today’s customers use reviews from other buyers to inform their purchase decisions. If your products and services are garnering positive reviews, other customers will be far more likely to put their trust in your offerings and invest in what you are selling. 

It’s a matter of trust. We trust consumer reviews online more than any source other than our own friends.

By responding to online reviews, you not only show the customer that you provide great service, but everyone else who researches your company will see it, too.

Write a Blog & Tighten Up Your SEO

Your digital presence can make or break the success of your business. There are thousands of people waiting to discover your brand online. But to facilitate this, you need to offer consistently high-quality content to make your business easier to discover on the internet.

An on-site blog is a must-have marketing tool for any business. Posting well-written, informative, and value-packed blog posts establishes you as a leader and an authority in your industry. Plus, it enables search engine algorithms to rank you higher on first-page searches. You can also optimize your on-site content on your landing pages using targeted SEO keywords to ensure that your page always pops up in relevant searches for businesses like yours.

And… that’s it for our affordable marketing campaigns and strategies.

The cheapest marketing strategies can help your brand get more exposure and generate a lot of interest from your audience, which should eventually lead to more sales and happy customers. VoxFeed can help you with a free-to-access influencer marketing and customer content platform. It will help you build your referral programs, get customer-generated content and get social media reviews. It’s perfect for your low-cost marketing strategies.