It may be true to some extent that, you need to spend money to make money; however, small business owners often find it difficult as they have limited funds to spare.
To keep your business profitable, you need to make sure every marketing money that you spend brings the highest ROI (return of investment). Below are six great tips how to maximise the return from your marketing budget.
1. Hire or outsource online freelancers
You could get access to both local and international talents who can provide you with a wide range of services that correspond to your business goals.
Freelancers typically specialise in one thing, and this is what you hire them for. Copywriters write content, mobile app developers build mobile apps, etc. The benefit is that they are very good at what they do.
Many have a great deal of experience with lots of different business backgrounds and projects as their wildcard. Each project that they work on and each client they collaborate with adds more knowledge and expertise to their portfolio.
Use your imagination for how you can leverage this pool of talent: maybe your business needs a logo, promotional art, or even a blog post.
On top of that, you might even get the job done faster, because when you’re hiring a freelancer, you’re hiring an expert to complete a task.
2. Partner with another local businesses
Is there another local business that doesn’t compete with you but has a similar customer base?
You might actually team up with them for cross-promotional benefits. For example, if your business has a graphic design company, you could collaborate with a printing company.
If you have a restaurant or bar that serves juices or smoothies, you could partner with a local gym.
Last year, iPay88 had a cross-promotional campaign with CIMB, where its customers who sign up or upgrade to BizChannel@CIMB Transaction Package enjoy fee waivers.
On top of that, there’s additional reward worth RM1,000 for iPay88 merchants. You may see the promotion here.
Set up a partnership in which both businesses display advertisements for the one another.
3. Share your knowledge
Content marketing is one of the most effective forms of online marketing, which costs almost nothing if you create the content yourself.
Does your website have a blog section?
Write informational content that you believe would appeal to your potential customer base. Within your field, there must be certain unique knowledge that your customers may lack of.
By sharing this knowledge, you’ll attract search engine traffic from people who are seeking for such information in your industry.
Every time the information that you provide helps someone, you’ll strengthen your brand and establish yourself as an expert within your field.
You might even convert your visitors to your potential customers. Once you have a blog set up, make sure to promote your blog post on your social media accounts.
4. Networking
One free marketing tool that every business has access to is networking. Networking is one of the most effective marketing strategies outside there.
Where you network will depends on your business type, but great place to start is a local business groups on Facebook. You need to make sure that group consist of local events that are relevant to your product or services.
Having a LinkedIn profile is important for keeping track of the connections you make and discovering new networking opportunities.
For business owners, you can start creating free events on free platform such as Peatix and Eventbrite, where business owner can promote their event while the public may discover your events.
5. Pay your suppliers on time
Wonder why I said so? You will save tons of money by taking up the advantages of discounts and avoiding late charges when you pay suppliers’ invoices on time.
As a result, you will gain goodwill and a better relationship with them that may result in better service and fairer prices in future projects.
6.Re-use the templates
Does your company regularly absorb large amounts of expenses when creating brochures or online promotional pages?
The amount is high because, every time you start to create marketing material from the scratch, you’re increasing your cost and extending the amount of time needed to complete and produce the material.
If the promotional item works well, save it as a template.
By doing that, you can save large amounts of money, because every time when you run another promotion, simply change the details in the template to save time and costs.
Conclusion
Convinced? Marketing is an important part of any businesses.
The challenging part of it is finding the right and suitable cost-effective ways to market your products/services and brand within the budget.
For small business owners, when it comes to marketing, you don’t need to be a marketing professional to get the public to know about your business.
You may even try out Guerrila marketing methods explained in our previous blog post.
With the right planning, it can help you ensure that every dollar is being spent efficiently. Give these tips a try and see how they work for your business.
Contact us for a free consultation here.
