Today’s businesses suffer from one giant dilemma—they need to reach more customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace and they also have tight budgets that demand results. It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that this is a huge problem for many businesses. In an ideal world, you could just throw unlimited amounts of money into your marketing budget, yet this isn’t possible.
When money is abundant, businesses tend to make choices that aren’t as effective or pragmatic. In this way, a tight budget may be beneficial in helping you create a concise marketing plan that targets customers that will actually purchase your products or ask for your service rather than just be aware of them. Here are a few basic ideas for marketing campaigns for under $100 to help you get started in expanding your business.
To begin with, make use of marketing materials that don’t cost anything. The best way to do this is using Internet tools that help you create word of mouth about your business without having to spend. There are many websites that people use for social networking that your business can use such as Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. These websites allow you to post information about your business—upcoming events, new products, change of service—for free and anyone connected to your business and anyone connected to them will hear about it. Use this as a soft campaign to generate awareness of your business to a huge customer base.
Another option is to set up an informational website associated with your business. Whatever you sell—cookies, janitorial service, or stiletto heels—you can create a website that helps people learn more about your realm of service and products without directly selling to them. This may seem contradictory, but many people research on the Web before purchasing products or services. If they happen to learn what makes a great cookie on your website, they’re more likely to buy from you when they’re ready. These sites are easy to set up (you already know everything) and they don’t take much to maintain since there’s no e-commerce applications, just simple text, pictures, and maybe video.
Work with companies that do targeted advertising online. Unless you’re selling a very general product, you probably do business with very interested people. In order for you to get customers who are serious buyers you need to go where they go. It’s expensive to post ads in magazines, but it is much less expensive to post ads with companies that will only charge you based on the number of times the ad is shown on a webpage that is topically related to your business. These companies greatly reduce your costs and you are only paying to advertise to people who are likely to buy.
Generally speaking, think of the modern marketing campaign this way—getting the word out to the public should be free and advertising to customers should be done directly based on their interests. The Web has revolutionized business in so many ways—there’s no reason it can’t save you money as well.
