Marketing is a challenge.
But marketing for a small business—when you have a small marketing budget—is a huge challenge.
Thankfully, the internet (along with the advent of digital marketing) has helped to level the playing field. Nowadays, even small businesses can outperform huge companies in a super-targeted niche—as long as they know what they’re doing,
But here’s the thing.
Since you have limited resources, you have to make them count.
If you do too many of the wrong things, and not enough of the right things, your business is doomed to fail.
You need cash flow to keep your business alive. But the only way to generate that is by properly marketing your business and making customers aware of your existence.
So in this post, you’re going to learn five ways to optimize a small marketing budget to give yourself the best odds for success.
Let’s dive in and talk about it.
1. Get Really Good At One Social Platform
Small business marketing requires you to use specific tools, and to target your unique customer avatar with those tools in a very focused fashion.
With that being said, social media is vitally important for small businesses.
However, it doesn’t take a marketing genius to see that there’s a great potential for overwhelm.
When it comes to choosing which social media platform to use, the first instinct is generally to try to use a shotgun approach; and to use all of them.
In theory, this is a great idea.
Here’s the problem though.
It costs your company more money to learn and utilize all of these different platforms.
Therefore, it’s usually in a small business’s best interest to go hard on just one or two social platforms instead of all of them.
This allows you to hone in and focus on the platforms that matter the most without burning extra resources on platforms that may not provide you with worthwhile returns.
2. Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is searchable content that lives on the internet forever.
Social media posts don’t generally fall into this category because they really only show up for a certain period of time before they get buried.
The best examples of evergreen content that you can optimize to help bring traffic to your website would be things like blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos.
For best results, choose one of these mediums and start creating content for your niche.
Deliver value-focused content that your customers will love, and make them aware of your knowledge in the field.
You can even use these channels to funnel traffic to your website and start collecting email addresses for direct mail marketing.
3. Learn SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization.
Creating content online is going to be vital to the marketing success of your business, especially if you’re operating with a small budget.
But it’s important to understand that every piece of content needs to take two different audiences into account.
On one hand, you need to create content that’ll be relevant and useful to your target customer.
But at the same time, you also need to create content that the internet search engine algorithms can find and deliver to those customers.
This is where SEO comes into play.
When you learn how to optimize your content for search engines, you’ll get your best chance of being found organically amongst the massive waves of content that are published every day on the worldwide web.
Failing to learn about SEO puts you at risk of failing to publish optimized content.
In other words, you may publish lots of great content. But if you don’t optimize it for SEO, it won’t get found by your target audience.
And that’s a huge missed opportunity for your business.
4. Build A Direct Mail List
Email marketing is powerful.
But here’s the thing.
Spam emails abound.
And if you want to make it through to your target customer without getting filtered out with the rest of the spam, you need to approach it very carefully.
You need to collect email addresses from targeted customer leads, and deliver high quality, valuable, free content to them through direct email broadcasts that actually help them and make their lives better.
Then, every so often, you’ll also need to send them an offer for a product or service that’ll give them the chance to level up their lives even more.
This is very reminiscent of Gary Vaynerchuk’s jab, jab, jab, right hook philosophy.
You deliver value, value, value (jab, jab, jab). Then, you come in with the right hook (the offer) to make the sale.
5. Involve The Community To Create A Buzz
Many small business owners don’t realize that the greatest potential for ‘buzz’ lives right in their own community.
For example:
- Having customers on your podcast
- Interviewing local common interest groups on your blog, or
- Partnering with complimentary local businesses to create YouTube content
could all be potentially beneficial ways to involve your local community to help create a buzz and increase attention around your own business.
But here’s the caveat.
These types of initiatives must always be organic.
Trying to involve your community just to make a few quick sales is the wrong approach.
Instead, involve your community to actually be helpful to them, create value, and make a difference.
This, in turn, will get people excited to work with you because it’ll be a mutually beneficial investment.
And at the end of the day, it’ll greatly increase your visibility.
And eventually, if you continue to operate with this same level of integrity, you’re bound to drive more sales as well.
Conclusion
There you have it.
5 ways to optimize a small marketing budget for your business.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to have a huge marketing budget to compete within your niche.
Dialing-in on your unique customer avatar and using extremely targeted and focused marketing techniques can be a recipe for massive business success.
But it will take effort, and it’ll require planning.
So stick with it, stay focused, and continue to learn and improve.