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4 ways to promote your brand on a limited budget

4 ways to promote your brand on a limited budget

A successful marketing campaign doesn’t always have to be an expensive one

What most online business owners lack when it comes to scaling their business is a big marketing budget.

A successful marketing campaign doesn’t always have to be an expensive one.

With the vast number of resources these days, anyone with the right mindset and creativity can take their brand to greater heights.

Need some advice on the best marketing tactics to use on a relatively small budget? Below is a list of 5 simple ways.

1. Provide great customer service

You may not always realize this but valuing your customer does a lot of wonders for your brand.

Even with just a small marketing budget, you can create an army of loyal customers who become your brand evangelists by exceeding people’s expectations.

Here are 3 tips to keep your customers happy:

  • Craft an audience persona – Understanding customers helps you offer products and services that match their needs and wants.

  • Start with your employee – You cannot create brand evangelists out of your customers without a team that strongly believes in your products.

  • Make it easy for customers to leave feedback – Aside from using surveys, let your visitors leave ratings and reviews on your site.

2. Give business cards

In this digital age, giving away business cards seems like an outdated tactic. But whether you’re low on the marketing budget or not, well-designed business cards remain to be an extension of your brand.

This is especially helpful if you operate a local store.

You can even make your business cards your edge over your competitors who are so focused on digital strategies.

Now, what to include on your business cards? Make sure that they feature your logo and tagline, contact information and social media profiles.

Most importantly, include a web address that will lead prospects to a specific page of your website (not your homepage). This page should be created for the purpose of helping them convert.

Start designing your very own professional business card using a designing tool.

Also read: 4 steps in building your startup’s content strategy from ground up

3. Publish valuable content

Content will always be king. There no getting around it. Content that entertains and solves readers’ problems remain to be a free way to promote your brand.

Publish different content types on your website to gain a broader reach and drive more traffic.

Make sure to proofread your content so that readers can easily understand it.

Don’t limit yourself to blog posts. Explore videos, webinars, podcasts, case studies, ebooks, and white papers.

Have a content marketing plan for promoting your content and tracking its performance.

Lastly, boost the shareability of your content by adding social sharing buttons. You can do this by installing a social sharing plugin on your site.

4. Take advantage of local listings

A huge benefit of having a local brand is that you can capitalize on a lot of online listing for free.

Online directories are no longer an option, they are must since 4 out of 5 consumers use their mobile devices to search for the nearest stores.

If you’re not using this online strategy, you’ll be missing out on the opportunity for people to visit your website and walk through your doors.

Always start by getting listed on Google My Business since this consistently shows up in online searches. Other local directories include the following:

  • Yelp

  • Bing

  • Yahoo

  • Yellow Pages

  • White Pages

  • Foursquare for Business

  • Angie’s List

A smart strategy that will allow you to increase your brand awareness on a small marketing budget is blog commenting.

Remember that for your blog comments to be effective in getting you traffic, you need to follow some important rules:

  • Study the site first – Is the site related to your niche? Make sure it is. Check the blogger’s writing style and topics so that you can leave a comment that he or she will appreciate.

  • Leave insightful comments – Avoid leaving generic comments or comments that are totally unrelated to the blog post. This will only kill your efforts. Read the post and add your own thoughts and tips.

  • Promote the post on social media – Sharing the post you commented on to your social media accounts increases people’s chances to see your comment. You can even tag or mention the blog author to start building a connection.

Conclusion

There are probably thousands of online business owners like you who still haven’t figured out how to promote their brand on a tight marketing budget.

It would be a mistake to leave out marketing just because you think you can’t pay for it. With these 5 practical strategies, you can surely get good results.

What matters is not always the amount of money you invest but the time and efforts you spend to reach your customers.

Can you think of other cost-effective marketing techniques? Share your ideas in the comment below.

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