Entrepreneurs and small businesses tend to have small marketing budgets. Follow these tips for stretching your budget and making the most out of what you can afford.
1. Focus on your organic search results. Yes, Google Ads will help your company’s website show up in search results, but you can do some of the work for free, too. Maintain a blog that you update weekly and make sure to use the same keywords and phrases in the copy, title and meta descriptions. Not sure which keywords to use? Google has a host of tools that will help you with your SEO research.
2. Reuse your content. If you find that a certain blog post or Tweet gets a lot of attention, use them over and over. So long as the content you’re producing is evergreen, you don’t have to worry about recycling it. You can even ad a small budget, like a $5 Facebook ad, to a past post that attracted a lot of new customers.
3. Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile viewing. Digital marketing efforts are worthless today if people can’t see your website or blog on their mobile device. Simply being available on mobile is sometimes enough to make a good first impression with a prospective customer or client. You can also advertise specifically to people who use mobile devices if you find that they make up a big part of your audience.
4. Don’t go overboard. You don’t need every single marketing material and ad that your budget will buy. The more you stretch your budget, the more you’ll be able to afford, but that doesn’t mean you should order every single hard mailer and online ad you can reasonably purchase. It’s better to put a majority of your money into one type of marketing than to spread it out too much.
5. Advertise to a small niche. The broader your advertising specs, the more money you’re going to waste. When designing social media or Google ads, take a lot of time to consider your true audience and the people who are going to convert and actually make a purchase. Only market to them; marketing to anybody else is a waste of your limited budget.
When you find something that works, stick with it. Don’t try to change a marketing method that’s already performing well. Instead, focus on changing and revising the strategies that aren’t offering a good ROI. When all else fails, consider a business loan from AFN to beef up your marketing budget!
