If you’ve read some of our posts here, you’ll have seen the emphasis we’ve placed on marketing as crucial to the success of any business. It is an interminable process that, if done right, gives your product or service much visibility, which is of course what every brand aims for. But what if you have a pretty low budget to work with? In this post we’ll show you the best strategies to employ if you’re short on funds.

Click here to read about must-use marketing strategies for every small business.

Get out there and meet people

Ensure that you attend local events, especially when they relate to your business. You never can tell where you’ll meet your next customer! For instance, if you are an artist, then you would do well to attend an art exhibition near you. If you can, bring along a sample or two of your product to show to people. Also, ensure that you are a good communicator. This is particularly important because you need to be as explanatory as possible where your product or service is concerned, and also, people feel more confident in you and your product if you come across as warm and skilled at dealing with people.

You can also exchange contacts with the people you meet. Get email addresses if you can, so that you can follow up with promotional emails. Those are less personal and actually quite underrated.

Embrace email marketing

Promotional emails are a good way of advertising your brand. You can set pop-up boxes on your website (if you have one) for visitors to put down their emails and subscribe to newsletters. Make sure that your emails are attractive and compelling.

There are platforms like Mailchimp that can assist you in running your email marketing, and you’ll find some free useful tools there as well. To find out more about email marketing, how it can suit your purposes and how you can construct the best emails, check out this site.

Utilise social media – it’s yours

Social media is a place for everybody, regardless of the size of their purse. To get the best out of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, it is not enough to just have an account. You have to be active, and constantly post engaging content that will attract potential customers. Sites like Constant Contact will help you understand how to post the most engaging content and manage your account effectively.

While sending posts on social media, especially on Twitter, you can make use of hashtags to mention your customers, potential customers or popular people, businesses and events in your post, ensuring that you get more visibility.

Hold on to present customers

Customer referrals are absolutely important. A huge number of businesses get more jobs through referrals. Hence, ensure that you are customer-centric: that is, you are focused on giving your customers the best treatment and optimum satisfaction they could possibly get. If your customers see your product or service as excellent, they are certain to refer you to others.

Video is the go-go

Video content marketing is much underrated. As we said in a previous post people love videos. Besides, they give your business more credibility, and, depending on how well you’ve prepared the video, make your brand more attractive.

Preparing videos professionally might be too costly for you given your low budget. However, with even just a decent phone and some affordable editing you can produce a video good enough to represent your business. Additionally, social media site like TikTok have made it easy to produce videos to suit your purpose.

As for content, you can conduct interviews with either your staff or your customers, or make instructional videos explaining your product or something related closely to it.

Create infographics and share them

An infographic is an image that describes a particular topic or product using highly visual imagery. They are usually intriguing to people because they present ideas in a very appealing manner. Infographics are very useful tools, and they can easily be distributed widely, making them a good way to engage your audience and popularise your brand. You can find sites online like DesignCap, visme and canva that offer free tools for creating quality infographics. They further provide you with templates which make it easier for you to design what you want by yourself.

Open up a blog and post great content 

Blogging allows you to get people’s attention by offering them your help. Start up a blog and write articles about topics closely related to your business. If, for instance, you are a hair stylist, you can write posts about how people can tend to their hair, hair problems and how they can be overcome, or different types of products and what they offer. If your blog helps your readers, they will see you as credible; and if you do a good job of promoting it, some of those readers will become your customers.

Make sure that you include the details of your business where readers can easily see them on the blog. Open up a comment section if possible and let readers share their experiences. In addition, ask them to share the articles on social media and to people they know.

Turn your friends and employees into ambassadors 

Your friends are there to assist you; don’t waste the opportunity!

If you ask your friends and your employees nicely, they’ll be more than willing to aid you in your brand promotion. Ask them to help you post your ads on social media and also talk to people on your behalf.

To wrap up…

We have listed multiple ways you can advertise your business and gain more publicity. Now, you can use any of these strategies without necessarily straining your pockets. The important thing, at least for now, is your determination. Marketing is never easy, whether you have a million naira or only a thousand, but if you persevere, you will see the satisfying rewards in the end. We wish you good luck!