Small Business Marketing: Marketing Ideas on a Low Budget

Marketing ideas for small business.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in business for a while now, there’s a wealth of ways you can do small business marketing for low or no cost.

Yes, you can spend big money on digital marketing for small business, with or without the help of an expert, but there’s now a ton of free small business marketing tools you can access to help you take on bigger brands at their own game—even on the global stage—with little or no expenditure.

How? By making savvy use of the democratic nature of the web to increase traffic to your site (SEO), get your products and services in front of more customers who need them (social ads), and ramp up your social credibility and reputation (content marketing).

There’s a caveat, though. SEO, digital marketing for small business, and content marketing aren’t rocket science—but they do take some time to get your head around and execute well.

If you’re willing and able to spend a little time focusing on your digital footprint, you can achieve almost as much as a small business marketing guru can (but for a lot less).

At Servcorp, we’re all about empowering business owners to grow and thrive, so we’ve put together a list of some of the most effective ways you can boost your small business marketing results even if you’re on a tight budget.

The 4 best marketing ideas for small businesses on a budget.

1. Get your SEO ducks in a row. If you sell online—whether its products or services—you need to get your SEO sorted. It’s crucial for attracting more traffic to your site. 

In fact, if your website is poorly optimised it can do your business a lot of damage:

• Google might penalise your site, which will drive your search engine position down and off the first page.
• Your site could be deindexed (removed from Google) completely (and it’s very hard to get it indexed again).
• Your rankings might stagnate (this often happens when your expensive SEO company outsources backlinks to overseas SEO providers to make a profit)

Now, SEO companies can charge up to $4000 per month in Australia to propel you to page #1 and make sure your site is humming Google’s tune. But you can actually learn to do it yourself. The first thing you need to do is analyse how your SEO is actually working.

Start by doing a full audit of your site. There are a number of SEO tools available (most for a fee) online to help you do this, but some sites offer a free overview—try Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer tool for a plain English guide to SEO.

Check for critical errors like low page word count, long loading times, duplicate meta descriptions or no meta descriptions at all. Then work through them methodically until you’ve resolved all errors. 

2. Build a brand tribe. Never underestimate the power of Facebook Groups for free small business marketing. When hundreds of millions of users checking their social media platforms for around 58 minutes per day on average, it’s a veritable treasure-trove of marketing opportunities.

If you enjoy sharing your ideas with like-minded people online, harnessing that skill is a great way to boost digital marketing for your small business. To grow a successful tribe of potential leads, you’ll need to share valuable content others will want to read and engage with.

Don’t focus on splashing your brand around as much as possible—start conversations without mentioning your brand at all. They key is to build your credibility with a warmed-up audience who are interested in what you have to say and may ultimately be interested in the solution your brand provides.

Once you’ve expanded your audience, consider setting up your own Facebook Group—it will be far more effective than your Facebook business page. Once you build credibility users will be more likely to click on links you post, which means you can direct them more regularly to your website. Which brings us to…

3. Blogging as if your business depends on it. This is the secret sauce in which your previous small business marketing efforts come together to create a delicious web of interest for potential customers. WordPress says that over 409 million read blogs on its platform every month. That’s a lot of potential marketing leads, but you’re going to need a great blog to get cut through – don’t be tempted to hire any old content monkey to help you achieve it.

A well-crafted, quality blog can do so many things. Posting content regularly on your site boosts organic SEO. Linking to great content on your social feeds drives traffic to your site (also boosting your rankings organically), and providing trusted, useful information develops brand loyalty and credibility, generating greater word of mouth, referrals, and piping hot leads.

What should you write? Above all, be helpful. Give people information they can use. Try to answer your visitors questions about your brand. Tell your story in plain English, avoid tech-speak or jargon and talk to your readers as you would a close friend. Focus on solving their pain points with down-to-earth guides and lists, reviews of products that might help them, case studies of how people like them overcame a problem. For more ideas, check here.

If you’re not into writing and you can’t afford to hire someone to help, try video or SlideShare decks.

4. Convert visitors to leads. Now that we’ve driven traffic to your site, now it’s time to talk converting visitors into customers. A simple way to do this is start collecting emails from users so you can promote your services and transform them into buyers over a longer time frame.

HubSpot Marketing Free is a great tool to try – you can add a pop-up widget to your home page to help convert leads. Or, try out any of these 10 free conversion tools that make digital marketing for small business easier.

Marketing ideas for small business are a vital part of your marketing arsenal. Use these strategies as an easy, free and scalable way to reach new and existing customers.

If you keep your brand top of mind with potential customers then, when you’re ready to splash out on more marketing options, you’ll have an audience ready to hear more and move closer to making a purchasing decision.

Our Servcorp Community Platform offers all our clients a great directory and opportunity to market their brands. Use it to connect with other businesses, promote your blog articles and special offers, broadcast events and more.