How To Promote Your Business Without Big Marketing & Advertising Budgets?

Marketing is essential for every business, regardless of its size, scale or nature of operations. Yes, marketing can be challenging without big advertising and marketing budgets, but it is not impossible. With the changing face of marketing and the rise of digital marketing, you don’t need to break the bank to effectively establish your brand and reach wider audiences.

With digital marketing, you don’t have to restrict yourself to conventional platforms like TV commercials, newspaper ads and OOH advertising. Digital marketing is a powerful tool that all kinds of brands can use to boost their organic reach, improve brand visibility, drive customer engagement and boost overall business growth. You can even personalize marketing campaigns at scale within shoestring budgets using the various available digital marketing tools.

Here are digital marketing tips for student entrepreneurs to promote their products effectively with their frugal resources.

Relevant, Authentic and Tailored Pitches

Firstly, identify your target audience; everyone online isn’t your audience. Think about the right value proposition based on customer personas and then create tailored pitches for each target group.

Make sure the pitch in your marketing campaigns is crisp, compelling, authentic and relevant to each user group. It must include a powerful call-to-action (CTA) that will prompt your target audience to visit your website or store. Your website must have the best possible landing page and offer clutter-free, relevant content to any website visitor.

Create a unique brand voice and maintain it across your branding and marketing activities. You should also consider integrating visual content in the form of images, GIFs and videos to elevate your campaigns. Only then can you break the clutter and noise in the market while retaining customer attention beyond 8 seconds.

Leverage the fear of missing out (FOMO) as a tactic to create urgency in your campaigns to drive sales up. You can conduct contests, offer limited-period offers and discounts, create longer-form relevant content (newsletters, whitepapers, etc.) that are offered after sign up, etc. to keep the audience engaged and increase your sales.

A lively social media presence

Social media offers several cost-free avenues to create and amplify your brand visibility. Choose the right platforms based on the product you are offering and how you are positioning your brand. Make sure to keep the content lively, interactive, relevant and refreshing. It helps to not be salesy and pushy about your product but create an authentic brand image.

You can conduct ask-me-anything (AMA) on platforms like Instagram and Reddit or live sessions on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to engage with your community. Be responsive to both negative and positive feedback from customers on social media platforms.

Use influencers

Social media influencers have quite an influence on customers today. Their reviews and recommendations leave an impact on the target audiences. Choose the right influencer for your TG and leverage their influence to promote a product.

Partnerships with Other Brands

Typically, products have complementary products or aligned verticals. You should enter into partnerships with such brands and conduct large contests with grand prizes or partnered giveaways. This will generate more attention and engagement than smaller, standalone giveaways of a single brand. Further, the marketing, distribution, manpower and resources will get distributed among all brands involved while the contacts, mailing lists and social media following will be pooled.

Promote user generated content and referrals

User-generated content is a great way to build content and promote your brand. For instance, you can create online forums or invite user stories, experiences and feedback, publishing them from your official handle. You can ask users to tag the brand and write feedback on social media and other platforms. You can also invite users to create reels or post pictures of the product and offer a discount for doing so.

Referrals are another great way to get your product noticed. 92% of people trust referrals that come from people they know, and people have 4 times more probability of buying a product referred by a friend. Offer small incentives, rewards or discounts to the source of referrals to boost the referral program.

Data-driven marketing

Leverage data analytics to improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns, reducing wastage and errors. You should also leverage analytics to personalize and tailor campaigns to different user groups and customer personas to improve the returns from the campaigns.

These are some simple and budget-friendly ways to promote your product and boost sales.