Low Budget Ways to Market Your New Business

Start-Up Marketing / February 16, 2016

Low Budget Ways to Market Your New Business

After many sleepless nights and months (or years) of research, planning, and saving up, you are finally ready to start up your business and join the league of entrepreneurs. But as exciting as it is to finally see your business launch, you face the challenge of every new business – the need to keep costs down until the business grows and revenue starts to come in.

You are new so you have no money but you need to market otherwise you will have no customers. So how can you create buzz about your business within your limited budget? Here are a few ideas on how to market your business at little or no cost:

Word Of Mouth: The best marketer for your business is yourself; hence nothing beats the power of talking about your business. This is the oldest form of traditional marketing, as well as the cheapest with a fairly good success rate. Depending on your kind of business, word of mouth could also involve communicating to prospects without necessarily saying a word, so if possible also make your appearance represent what you are selling.

Referrals: Once you have a few happy customers under your belt, use referrals to market your business. Once Tina receives fantastic service from you, not only will she talk highly of your business but if you make it easy for her to refer her friends by first asking for a formal reference/customer testimonial/Facebook post or whatever form fits your business and also rewarding her for her referral (tell a friend, get a discount etc.). This way you can use referrals to get the word out about your business and minimal cost to you.

Back to Back Barter: Collaboration is the name of the game in the modern business world. We live now in the age of shared workspaces such as the former Enterprise Creative HotHouse or (capitalsqua.re), incubators (cchub.com), start-up hubs (www.440.ng). This evolution poses tremendous opportunities for new businesses, as they can strike a deal with another startup to offer each other complementary services, void of money exchanges.

Pay as You Use Ads: Digital platforms offer low-cost advertising options. Explore social media advertising, especially on Facebook, where you can set up a campaign at a moderate cost and push it out in a matter of minutes, track your investment and tweak your marketing copy until you get the right response. There are also new innovations such as Vacantboards (www.vacantboards.com) who are giving premium billboard sites or locations to small businesses at fantastic low rates for a limited timeframe (which is usually long enough time for visibility).

Social Media Marketing: Before the turn of the millennium, there was no such thing as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. MySpace didn’t come along until 1999, rising to popularity in 2003, while YouTube didn’t exist until another couple of years after that. The presence of these digital platforms has changed the direction of marketing and as a startup you can effectively grow your business by marketing on any of the aforementioned platforms. Build your reputation online by spreading the word on your expertise and ultimately on your business

Promotional Rewards: Immediately after a client has made a purchase from you, reward that client with a promotional offer, for example thank them for their purchase and offer a 10% discount to use with their next purchase (be sure to put a validity period on the offer).

Email Marketing: Email marketing is simple, quick and extremely cost effective, making it a very powerful marketing tool for small businesses. You can obtain clients directly from your website with a simple “subscribe to our newsletter” link. This is also a good way to promote your business as you may find that people forward your email to their friends therefore increasing your visibility.

Now you have a few more ideas on how to market your new business, go ahead and make things happen. All the best!!

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