When you’re starting a small business from scratch, a low budget marketing plan can help you grow. Follow these inexpensive marketing ideas for small business to find new clients without spending a lot of money.
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Low Budget Marketing Plan
A low budget marketing plan for a business-to-business (B2B) service has 3 primary steps:
- Find where your prospects hang out
- Help them solve problems
- Build a following
When you help your prospects find affordable solutions the problems they are experiencing, you are creating goodwill and increasing the value of your brand. This builds trust, which is a first step in your prospect’s journey to buying your products and services.
Inexpensive Marketing Ideas for Small Business
Inexpensive marketing ideas for small business revolve around being creative and scrappy with your efforts. As a result, this low budget marketing plan takes a little time to execute. The big benefit is that they can generate highly qualified leads for your small business.
Let’s address each of the 3 steps in this affordable marketing solution to drum up new business.
1. Find Where Prospects Hang Out
For B2B services, it’s a good bet that your prospects learn about new trends and answers to their questions online. So, go where they hang out.
- Discussion forums – Quora is a good starting point, Reddit is another.
- Social media – use hashtags to attract those looking for similar topics.
- LinkedIn groups.
- Companies who already target your market but provide an unrelated, complementary service.
2. Help Prospects Solve Problems
- Look for posts of questions that you can answer.
- Don’t sell your services. Instead, give open advice about how to tackle their issue.
- Be consistent – don’t do this a couple of times and then stop. Regular postings are proven to generate more qualified traffic to your website.
- Do webinars with companies that provide complementary services. You can even automate webinars to save time.
3. Build a Following
- Start writing deeper responses to the questions you’re answering in the forums you identified in Step 1.
- Post them to a blog on your site.
- Use Yoast or another SEO plugin to optimize your posts.
- Share your content on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). Again, use hashtags to attract the right audience.
- Offer a checklist for download on your website, positioned on your blog pages for easy access by your new visitors.
- Create an email newsletter to keep in touch with your new contacts.
Affordable Marketing Solutions
These inexpensive marketing ideas for small business do many things simultaneously. They help you find where your fish are swimming, give you a hook, and create a brand that attracts qualified prospects.
Be sure your website responds quickly when visitors stop by. Many companies host their websites on slow servers. This causes visitors to bounce, which means visitors leave your website within seconds due to slow page load speed or other website usability issues.
We use and recommend (affiliate link) SiteGround – it’s quite inexpensive and provides fast, reliable web hosting. They also provide solid 24/7 support and can even port your existing WordPress website so you’re up and running the same day.
When people read your updates on social media and click through to get more information on your website, you want their experience to be as perfect as possible.
More Inexpensive Marketing Ideas for Small Business:
- Marketing Plan Example – download a free sample marketing plan that you can edit
- Goal-Driven Social Media Marketing Plan – use this social media plan to create your own
- Content Discovery – learn how to identify the best content ideas to write about
- Customer Referral Program – see how to get customers to refer more business
As long as you continue educating your prospects using this low budget marketing plan, they will become open to hearing your product or service pitch.
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