Five Cost Effective Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses

We are all feeling the crunch as businesses. After two years of the madness from the pandemic, the massive price jumps on everything, the still ongoing random shortages of items, numerous businesses shutting down, and looming recession, the need to stop spending on non essentials is understandable. Marketing is one of those non essentials as most of the time you never see a direct result of what you spend in obvious concrete numbers. The reality is that if you don’t keep marketing your business, new potential customers will not find you, and even your old ones will forget you in time. So in these cash strap days, what are the most cost effective ways of marketing your business?

What is ‘cost effective’?

What do I mean when I say cost effective?  This isn’t just about dollars, though that’s the primary value judgement most people use, it’s about your time too. Unless you’re willing to spend money to get some marketing business to do it for you, you will have to be your own marketing team. With every hour you spend having to manage that, that’s an hour you’re not spending generating revenue by working with clients. (Or spending it with your family or friends, for small business always have to do this sort of thing out of ‘office hours’) If you’re not a sole trader operation, you will have employees that you could use to do this work but it means they will be doing it during operating hours when they could be doing revenue generating work instead.

You’re gonna have to be honest with yourself about this, how many hours can you afford to spend on marketing your business. You know how much an hour you cost to a client so treat the value of your time doing marketing as the same. How many hours can you afford to spend paying yourself or a staff member to do marketing of your business.

So with this in mind, let’s look at the different levels of cost effective marketing you should consider as a small to medium sized business.

No Website, No Business

It’s as straightforward as that. If you don’t have a website, potential customers aren’t going to be able to find you. While there’s still a place for things like traditional media (newspapers, radio) advertising and the yellow pages, let’s be honest here, everyone ‘googles it’ first to find a business to serve their needs. Now it doesn’t need to be fancy or full of videos and complex web 2.0 stuff that costs a lot of money to set up and billable time to maintain. For most people you need only a landing page.

A landing page is a single page website that has your basic contact information, some testimonials, with images or videos if appropriate, and most importantly lots of useful information that search engines can suck up and use to put your business in their results. We won’t go into all the details on how to make a great landing page as that would require a full article by itself. (Watch this blog.). 

What sort of effort does it take to have a landing page? Going through a hosting provider such as Wix or SquareSpace will provide all the tools and ready made templates. Pick a package and template that fits your needs. Fill in the blanks and do the tweaks to make it more personal. Then you’re done. These sorts of providers will take care of everything, from supplying a domain name, to running automated maintenance and providing a call centre for help if things go wrong. While you are trading off some control and fine grain ownership of the site, to get you going and have ‘it’ take care of itself then it’s a very cost effective solution.

My additional recommendation is to at least check on it weekly even if you’re not planning to update any of the content. Just to make sure nothing has broken because of an update or change made by your website provider. Do spend a bit of time reviewing the site every quarter to make sure that the contents of the site still matches what your business is now and keeping the testimonials fresh. These updates are also noticed by the search engines as updated pages generally will get higher in the ranks than an unchanging one.

Business Cards and Flyers Still Work

No I’m not kidding, business cards are still really useful as a marketing device. Yes you have your contact details, but depending on your business it can do so many other things. If you’re mostly online, then put in QR codes on the back of your card to let them jump to key examples on your site with a quick scan of your phone (or just copy your contact details into their address book.) Not digital, then it can be your micro marketing flyer listing the range of services you provide in a quick easy to remember glance. Retail, turn business cards into a price tag. We’ve talked about many other examples of what you can do in this blog so have a look and see what cool ideas spring to mind.

Flyers and brochures are still a vital part of all business marketing. The trick is to not spend big to make them cheap, but spend smart to make them valuable.  You can have as much effect with postcard or DL size flyers as you would with an A4 but without the A4 costs. Use the physical media to link directly to your website so you can keep the freshest information there. A well designed flyer will be useful throughout the year and ready to hand out at a moment’s notice. Brochures work well when you want to provide more detailed information that lets people digest at their own pace but still have your contact details all over it.  Use fast turn around printers (like us here at Copy Express) to print just what you need when you need it. Don’t order a year’s worth, just 3 to 6 months is enough, as you should be reviewing them every few months to make sure they stay relevant to your business.

The time needed to create business cards, flyers, and brochures is quite light. Yes you might need to spend a few hours planning the original designs. Yes you may have to pay for a designer to create the starting design. (Or purchase a template you can use yourself.) But if you go in with the requirements to be able to easily update, then changing them to match your changing needs will only take minutes instead of hours.

Social Media Only If You Have The Time

This is one trap that a lot of businesses have fallen into, thinking that social media is required for businesses to have effective marketing.  The reality is social media is easy to do but very hard to do well. We’ve covered this before on the blog and will be covering it again in the future.  It does have a place in your marketing, as many people use it to learn about the company ‘feel’ and to find out what people really think about the business they have been dealing with. It’s also a great tool to contact those who have had posted issues, letting others see how well you take care of customers.

With that in mind, unless you’re in a business that relies on a lot of direct interaction with customers, you should only do it when you have down time or can make quick posts. With social media you can preload posts and items to go out automatically. This is perfect for times that aren’t generating revenue or needed to keep the business operating. You have to ‘pay’ for those hours even if you’re not working, so why not use it to create content for your social media and set them to go out automatically while you are busy. In between times you can make a quick ‘5 second view‘ post that can be created in a quiet moment during your busy working day to upload as something more fun and ‘off the cuff’.  As I said at the start, social media is easy to do but hard to do right. Put this work down lower on the list over more low maintenance work like websites and flyers.

Become A Local Expert On Your Area Of Business

A companion to social media advertising is to become the local expert online. How is this different from social media? Social media for a small business is mostly about using the system to promote individual items or services from your business or bits of fun content related to it. Its focus should be on ‘snackable’ content, that is things that can have their impact on a person’s feed as they scroll through it, even if they don’t open the post. Becoming a local expert is generating longer form content, such as blog articles or short videos, to provide information that isn’t always obvious to the everyday person. Don’t think that it’s just limited to complex white collar fields, even the trades can get a lot of impact from explaining the basics of their profession to novices (to temper their expectations if nothing else.)

There are several reasons why you might want to invest time in doing this type of marketing. Firstly, having the material on your website will keep its ‘freshness’ high and that helps improve your ranking in search engine results. Secondly, depending on your business  it provides a quick guide you can provide clients with that reduces the amount of time you have to go over material with them. Thirdly, if you need to create the content for people anyway as part of business, why not put a cut down version of it out there as marketing with promotional hooks to ‘find out more’. Lastly, by putting material out there, you’re showing that you know what you are talking about and potential clients will be more willing to consider you for their needs.

Labels and Signs, Great Reminders

This last option applies more to those who work in ‘blue collar’ / trades jobs. If you have to work on site for several days, why not get permission from the owners to put up a lawn sign or a banner advertising your business. A trades person can supply a servicing record, be it a card or a sticker, to what they just worked on both as a reminder of what and when it has been done, but more importantly who should be called for future work. The same concept can work for any product sold that has consumables or needs specialised servicing to continue operating. You can create these types of items to have trackable serial numbers, warranty information, recommended consumables, and so on. Do they have the same impact as a website or flyer, no. What they do is short circuit the process of a person looking for help next time they need it. People want solutions fast, and if they can see right away that your business helped them last time, they are far more likely to contact you this time around.

The amount of effort required to do this sort of marketing is minimal as well. Creating the original product is no more effort than creating an effective flyer. Once done, it’s just making sure you use it every time. The more times you use it, the more effective it becomes.

What can a business do beyond those ideas?

That boils down to what you do and what sort of spare time and money you have available. The five sets of examples here should be enough to cover most business general needs.  From there you need to consider the unique demands of the business you are operating in. What an individual business could do to go beyond these starting points will require articles of their own (and which some have already been covered in previously.) We always recommend looking closely at other businesses in the same industry or market and make note of what they do. Some of those things would be universal if your business isn’t doing it, you better start. Others might not be how you want to present your own, so this will guide you on how to stand out from the crowd. We also always recommend talking to others, not just friends and family but asking customers how they found your business and what made them pick yours. Not just what worked but to point out what isn’t working so you know to stop investing your resources into it, or to give it an overhaul. Finally there are special firms that cover the various forms of business marketing. It can be a worthwhile investment to hear the opinion from an expert on what can do better or what you might be missing out on.

Now it’s in your hands

We’ve covered five cost effective marketing strategies, how you should calculate your spending limits and what to do when you’ve reached the limits of those starting ideas. We do recommend allocating some of your time over a month reading various marketing article online to keep abreast with trends and to learn what unsuitable strategies you could be wasting your time and money on. We’ll be one of those vital resources for your business. Along with giving the choice of one on one marketing advice when you need it.  So keep an eye out for our articles here on the Copy Express blog and contact us if you want some help