Even if you are offering exciting products to your target audience, people will not purchase them unless they know about your presence. Marketing is exceptionally crucial to ensure that your users do not forget you regardless of your business stage.
If you are a start-up, it becomes more paramount to promote your products and services. However, it is easier said than done. One of the significant challenges is that it requires a large budget. Since you have already dipped in most of your savings to get your startup off the ground, you can market your business on a shoestring.
You need money to do good marketing, and you cannot do it unless you make good sales. This is why you should make a marketing budget. Before you go aimlessly, you should plan how and where you will spend your money to attract the attention of your users.
Of course, the marketing will go side by side, but at the outset, you need to do it rigorously because this is the only way to drive sales. Here is how you can promote your business when you are on a thin budget.
Do homework to find your affordability-Startup
Unless you reach the breakeven point, you are to use your own savings to hit the ground running, and this is why you cannot afford to throw the whole of the money at your business marketing. The first step is to identify how much your business needs to invest in it.
You will have a reservoir exclusively set aside for this purpose at the outset, but as users begin to buy your products, you will have to carefully analyse the number of sales and the amount of profits you gain on each sale.
The advantage of using this method is that your sales budget will also decline if you notice a slow growth in a particular month. As a business owner, you will always aim to make most of your marketing budget. If the cost is higher than the number of profits you can generate, this is a loss.
A rule of thumb says that you should invest a fixed portion of that money in marketing when you start making sales. It can be 5 to 10% of your sales revenue. Try to stick to it because it will help you invest your money in the marketing of your business sustainably.
Use the right marketing tool For your Startup
You may have funded your business with New business startup loans and this is why it could be hard to manage your marketing expenses. Further, you have the pressure of keeping the ball rolling. Although some of the marketing tools are expensive, you can still fit them into your budget.
Start with search engine optimisation. You must have organic traffic to your website, and that could be possible with SEO. Identify what people want to listen to from you and provide that information through your website and blogs.
Once people begin to visit your site, ask them to sign up to get an immediate notification when you have new products and special discounts and schemes. Email marketing is a great way to engage your users.
Send your subscribers newsletters. However, do not send unsolicited newsletters. Social media platforms also help you a lot to reach out to your audience. If you feed your users with what they want to hear from you, you will get an immediate rise in the number of genuine prospects. Identify their current problems and try to give them a solution.
Save on hiring staff if you are a startup
If your business needs staff, you will have to spend money on hiring people. Recruitment is expensive, and it may take a bit longer time to hire the best and talented people. You will also need to invest in software solutions to manage it.
You can outsource hiring until you start earning a great amount of profits. Outsourcing will be much more affordable than building an internal team of the manager. Instead of hiring full-time employees, you should look for freelancers.
You can avoid blocking money in buying a location or renting out an office building. Freelancers will get money based on projects you assign to them. You will be liable to pay them only when there is a project, which is not the case with full-time employees.
startup- Decide if it is worth paying for
As your business grows, you will begin to expand your marketing budget. You will likely explore those marketing ways that you did not when your budget was thin. However, experts suggest that you should carefully monitor if it is worth paying for.
Try to identify if it is going to yield some benefits. For instance, you may be tempted to run paid social media campaigns. It can boost your posts and significantly increase your reach, but it may not improve your prospects.
When you get great exposure with paid campaigns, it is not necessary that all of them will be interested in your products. This is not a pure form of inbound marketing that lets your users find you when you need it, which happens when you do unpaid marketing.
The bottom line
Running a business can be intimidating, especially when you have an inadequate budget. It becomes challenging if you have already taken on small business loans for bad credit. A rule of thumb says that you should find out how much you can spend every month on your marketing plan.
At the outset, try not to spend more than 5% of your sale revenues. Do not chase paid marketing methods. Instead, you should focus on email marketing, content marketing, social media management, and above all, search engine optimisation.
The more organic methods you use to attract users, the more credible your business will be. You do not need to stick to one marketing plan. If one does not work, make another plan.