Online marketing tactics for small businesses with low budgets

The best marketing results can be achieved by investing time and money. Larger businesses can afford to put in more money than time. They would rather lose a few thousand dollars testing ad variations than allocate a lot of time for marketing. 

But as a small business or startup, money isn’t the most easily available resource. In such a case, what marketing strategies can you adopt to grow your business from scratch?

In this post, we talk about the most effective marketing strategies you can use even with low advertising budgets. 

Focus on organic traffic

According to ahrefs, 92.96% of global traffic starts at a Google search, image search, or the Google maps box. While using Google search ads to be on the top of the rankings can definitely help your business grow quickly, it is unsustainable. 

The moment you stop spending, the ads stop. 

Organic traffic is different. It is known as “earned traffic” because Google’s search algorithms need to deem your content or website worthy of being on the first page of search results. 

Let’s talk about how you can make organic traffic your main source of leads and revenue. Below is a very simplistic perspective of the steps to rank on Google. You’ll learn more tricks as you go along. 

1. Start a blog

Boring old blogging is still equally relevant. Though the marketing community prefers to call it “content marketing,” the fundamental concept remains the same. Produce content that helps your prospects. 

To begin with, identify what questions your audience asks on Google search. 

Suppose you are a plumbing business. Your audience will consist of people who try to fix a problem themselves before they approach you.

The task here is to write a blog that guides readers through the entire process of fixing the problem. 

It may sound counterintuitive to help customers fix problems. But it helps your brand to be viewed as an authoritative source of information. When they have a bigger problem to fix which they cannot handle by themselves, guess who they will approach?

2. Outreach relevant websites

Writing a piece of content is the first part of the equation. To get some traffic flowing to the blog, it’s time to outreach a few relevant businesses in the niche. Offer them a service or a guest post and ask for a link back to your blog. 

It takes time, and you’ll be rejected a lot, but a few great backlinks and your blog will start climbing up the ranks in search results. In fact, local businesses can get a lot of benefit from high-quality backlink outreach.

3. Consistently product content

Google loves fresh content. If you can spend the time or afford to hire a freelance writer, take it up as a small upfront investment. 

Of course, you have to research keywords and questions that your prospects are searching for on Google. And getting a regular flow of articles from your content writers can easily get you ranking on many search terms and begin generating leads organically. 

Social media promotion and marketing

It makes sense to be on social media when you do not have a significant market presence. Social media requires more active work but can benefit you in the long run with a loyal community of users. 

And if you want to spend the least amount of money for stunning results, Facebook ads are great. They’re easy to configure, and you can test ads on a budget as low as $5 per day. 

Look through Facebook ad ideas to get an understanding of the concept before you invest the money. 

1. Create a community 

A Facebook group or an Instagram page is your first step for building the foundation. People on social media want to be entertained and informed. If you can create tutorials in the form of short videos where you show the results and the process through a hyper-lapse video, you’re going to receive a lot of love from the audience. 

The more consistently you post such content, the more people will begin following your page or group. This overall turns into a good source of long-term leads. 

2. Run social media ads

Ads are an easy source of quick traffic. The hardest part is to filter your audience out. 

To run an ad profitably, you must understand the intricacies of your audience’s behavior. Here are a few questions you must have an answer to before you begin:

• What region are your users from?
• Are your customers majorly male or female?
• What’s the income level and job profile?
• What groups on Facebook or pages on Instagram do they follow?
• What type of posts do they enjoy? 
• At what time do they prefer browsing their social media feeds?

Identifying the answers to these questions can be time-consuming. So there’s a much better way to approach this problem. 

If you have already started getting readers from organic searches, you can use a Facebook ad pixel to automatically generate a customer persona. This will reduce the ad testing spends, and you can begin targeting the right set of users immediately. 

You can take a look at the Facebook Pixel guide InVideo has published on their blog. It’s a comprehensive set of steps to set up the Facebook pixel and also consists of other content pieces that discuss the best way to get the most out of your pixel implementation.

3. Think out of the box

People browsing social media have seen it all. They know their memes, and they know when you repost. So to get the most out of your marketing effort on any medium, the most powerful strategy is your ability to think out of the box. 

If you are a plumbing company, find a way to create controversy within the community without hurting anyone’s sentiments. Controversial posts generate maximum traction! 

Conclusion

Stay consistent with your efforts. As your business revenue grows, you can reinvest a part of it in running higher budget ads and claiming more adspots. 

But grab as big of the organic traffic pie as you can. Ads can give a boost but will last only until your budget exists. Your earned marketing effort will be appreciated and received much better in the community you plan to target.