Small budget marketing

Most small businesses have a small budget for marketing. It is not uncommon for small businesses to find one marketing strategy that works and then stick with it, especially if they don't want to expand their company. There are a lot of marketing tactics that will cost your company a lot of money, but you don't need to follow them. If you are a small business, here are some easy marketing tips to help expand your business.

Send your coupons via email campaigns and mail campaigns. Customers are always looking to save money, even if it is only fifty cents. Using your email campaigns can help you track which customers are using their email accounts and actually spending time on your e-mails. Another way to get your coupons out to your customers is to contact companies like Valpak and others that bundle clients together in one envelope and send out the coupons to a specified area. Bundling your coupons with other companies will save you a lot of money and it will help you target a local audience. Using Valpak and other providers will cost a lot less then sending direct mail pieces to all those customers on your own.

How about door-to-door marketing? A lot of high-school students are looking for after-school jobs. Door hangers are a great way to market your business and you only need to pay an hourly wage to the student to walk around and put the door hangers on multiple houses. It's a great way to cover a broad area, but you may have to hire a few teens to walk around and put door hangers out if you want to reach all the customers in that area.

Another great way to target your audience is to use paid search. Whenever your target audience does a search for your product, your name will appear before your competitors in the search engine results. To guarantee that you are at the top of the search engines, you may need to use pay-per-click marketing. It is important to try and get on the first page of search engine results because most internet users will not go past the first page. Local paid search is a lot cheaper than national search, which can cost you thousands of dollars in advertising each month.

Set-up an e-marketing list and send out weekly or monthly emails to your subscribers. You need to inform them about new products that are in the works and offer them discounts if they order during a certain time. Email marketing is free if you do it on your own. The nice thing about e-marketing is most of the people on the list have signed-up for this service. They want to get emails from you, just try to avoid overwhelming them with too many emails. Most email marketers suggest only sending about 12-24 emails out a year, this way you aren't being too annoying to your customers, but you are still getting some results.

Another low-cost marketing strategy is to use press releases. Getting local and state-wide attention from the media can really benefit your company. Several companies will even look for places to do their broadcasting from. If you have something to offer customers, let the media know about it and if they are interested, they will give you a call. Read the newspaper often and look for times when you can write an editorial. For example, if you are in the financial world and people have been concerned over their retirement accounts, write an editorial offering suggestions on how your company can help them keep their retirement.