Marketing On A Budget Small Business
Most small business start small. And usually when your business is still in the start-up phase, your budget is limited. One of the most important things a small business owner needs to worry about is the operating cost of the business and therefore as a business owner you need to plan ahead and set yourself a reasonable budget. Without proper planning one would definitely be having trouble with all the spending and things could go out of hands and before you know it, your initial capital or budget will be all gone.
Be careful not to go over budget
One of the rules for small business owners with a small budget is to be as clear as possible what the consequences of going over that budget that you have set. Besides that, one should be very wary of what he is spending the small business budget on. Be very careful not to spend too much on anything that has no guarantee of return. Learning this the hard way can be very painful as we are talking about a lot of cash. One good example of over spending on the wrong area is to create a Facebook fan page and spending thousands of dollars on the Facebook Ads just to find out that there is no good way to monetize these fans.
Another example would be to spend a lot of money on a CPA campaign that is too old to work anymore but has a very good historical statistic to back it up. If a CPA offer has gone stale and saturated, conversions will definitely suffer and it will be hard to profit from such a campaign even when you are seeing huge EPCs numbers on the statistic boards.
Know your small business market.
Knowing your market is the first thing you need to be doing if you want to be saving on your cost and marketing within your budget. If you can drill it down to the demographics and the exact type of people that you want to target, you will be able to locate these people at the right place and time and try to monetize them without having to waste money on people who are not targeted at all.
There is absolutely no need for you to hire a marketing company to do a thorough research for you on your target market. You can easily find out your target market by looking into your existing customers or think logically who will most likely to buy your product. When you know who they are you need to confirm this by browsing into forums and the Internet and seek out where these people are lurking about. You can ask questions and see the response of the market regarding your niche, and you can even try to communicate with them to find out what they are really seeking for.
When you know exactly what they want, you’ll be able to naturally give them what they want and that’s when a sale could likely happen. Find out what are their troubles and see if your product has what it takes to help them solve it or not.
Plan ahead.
The best thing as you can do for your business is to plan ahead. This way… things get done in an organized manner and that you will know exactly how to respond to the situation that you will be facing ahead of you. Plan on your traffic strategies and make other plans in case your initial plan is not working very well. Find out what others are doing and adjust your plans accordingly.
Always include budget setting in your planning phase. This is to ensure that you are clear where and when you want to be spending money and how much can you afford to lose in order to gain. When you are just starting out, you should never try to lose money first and hope to earn money back on the back end. This is because you cannot guarantee the return. What you can do is to spend some money (without losing too much) and try to earn back your investment as soon as you can.
Only when you are sure that your funnels are working on the specific traffic source should you be making new plans on how you would spend to make more money based on your initial test.
Branding.
Branding for small business may seem like useless task to some, but the best businesses out there brands themselves for a reason. Even for small business with a tight budget, branding awareness is totally achievable with very little cost especially if you place your efforts into churning out good contents and social networking.
Use a mascot or a good memorable logo (you can choose to use your own picture) to help the brand awareness going. Use videos, and audio instead of only text contents to show people that you are very established and this will help you get a lot more trust towards you and your brand. When people perceive you as the expert that’s when you will see people putting their money and trust in you in hope for a solution to their problems.
Cheap Traffic Strategies.
There are a lot of cheap traffic strategies out there which a small-business owner with a tight budget can go for. One of them is of course as mentioned above before is utilizing social networks to get your traffic. Another great source of traffic is to use Article Marketing to spread the words about your business out into the internet world far and wide across the globe.
Viral video strategies are great as well as long as you have an interesting content that will appeal to the masses. Lastly, look into search engine optimization strategies because it will surely provide you with a lot of targeted traffic for free if you are able to rank high. In fact, it remains until even today that people believe the best converting traffic will come from search engines and one of the ways to get search engine traffic is to use SEO and rank your sites high for the correct search terms.
