Running a small business is challenging. In fact, 45% of don’t survive the first 5 years.
The truth is, you can stand out from the competition and get more customers if you focus on marketing. It doesn’t matter how great your product is — if you don’t market your brand properly, your chances of success are low.
Unlike popular belief, marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. We understand that small businesses run on a limited budget.
So whether you’re selling books out on the street or coaching material on the internet, here are 7 digital marketing strategies for small businesses on a shoestring budget.
Contents
Build a website for your business
With the rapid use of the internet today, it is very important to have a website for your business. This way, you will be able to easily reach a large audience without much effort.
Your own eCommerce website provides a platform where you can conveniently display the goods and services offered by your business.
You should ensure that the website has a friendly user interface and that the prices of all your products are clearly shown. With solutions like Instamojo, you can also start collecting payments for your products and services from your website.
Besides, if a website sounds scary to set up right now, you can always rely on the Instamojo free online store.
- It’s free to set up
- It takes less than 5 minutes
- You don’t need any coding skills AT ALL
Find out how you can set it up here.
Ramp up customer service
This must be the most affordable digital marketing strategy for small businesses.
Happy customers are the best marketers for your company. Customer satisfaction is an important part of any business.
Knowing what the client likes and dislikes enables you to know which areas of your business are okay, which ones should be eliminated and which ones should be improved.
FB ads, referrals and discounts are good to get new customers. But how do you actually end up ensuring that they buy from you again?
This eBook explores affordable strategies to amp up your customer engagement skills.
Social commerce
Social media is a great place to market your business. In India, nearly eight out of 10 social media users in India use social commerce to make purchases. Do you really want to miss out on this massive opportunity to get discovery lead sales?
Here’s how you can leverage social media to market your products:
- Find out which platforms your target audience is active on
- Create relatable and valuable content around your niche
- Stay on top of current trends and what’s hot on social media
- Direct followers to your eCommerce website with product links
Here’s a guide to know more about the importance of social media for business.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Also known as organic marketing, SEO helps your website/content rank higher on Google without paying any money.
It refers to optimising the content you have to fit the requirements set by your search engine. Here are some key factors that help you in ranking first on search engines, and hence get a whole lot of clicks!
- Implementing a keyword strategy
- Improving product descriptions
- Ensuring the meta tile and meta descriptions are all set
- Your product images have the appropriate alt tags
- Your website is mobile optimised
Want to get started with the basics of SEO? Here are a few resources for you:
- eCommerce SEO: Your complete guide
- 3 keyword strategies to improve your online store SEO
- 5 SEO Hacks to Rank High on Google
- How to Optimize Images for SEO: Step-by-Step Checklist
Write, write, write
One of the best ways to tell Google about your value is to have written content that proves it! If you are selling shoes, then writing a blog about the different types of shoes for different occasions, or the ways of taking care of certain shoes – all show your expertise in the subject matter.
These written pieces also help your online store get discovered more, and you get the ultimate advantage of building a brand.
Related read: How to use a blog to increase your sales
Create marketing videos
Is it any surprise that businesses are using video marketing at the highest rate ever in 2023? An all-time high number of marketers (92%) told Hubspot in their ninth video marketing report that they get a good ROI on video content, up from 87% in 2022.
With the massive penetration of social media globally, videos are now king. If you want your business to reach newer people, making videos for meta platforms is the most effective way! And contrary to public opinion. Making videos can be an affordable, easy and fun strategy!
Leverage partnerships
Don’t take on all the burden of selling yourself, set up mutually profitable systems to do that for you.
Starting an affiliate network to help you with the sales of your products is the right way to go. The affiliate program works by having others market your products and in turn, you pay them a certain percentage as a commission for each product sold.
Affiliates enable a business to penetrate into areas that it may not have reached otherwise.
LeadsGuru, an ed-tech platform, used affiliate marketing to grow their business by more than 110% in 3 years. See how they did it here.
Discount sales
Try not to undervalue your product by giving it away for free. But the next best way to attract eyeballs is discounting.
Use discounts as a marketing strategy to draw more clients to your business, it’s a powerful pull mechanism. You can generate public or private discount coupons or even create links that redirect customers to special promotions sites.
Related read: How to run festive discounts sale the right way
When a customer successfully buys your products at a discounted price, they will in all probability refer others to you and your business will continue to thrive.
Either way, once you have a customer it’s easier to pitch to him/her than to a stranger.
With Instamojo you can create discount codes on your online store. There is also an option to limit the number of items that are sold with a specific discount code.
Upsell and cross-sell
Upselling is when you sell a more valuable product to the customer than the one they originally expressed intent for. Cross-selling is when you can convince the customer to buy products that are related to the product already in their cart.
Keeping a record of your customers is one of the areas where most businesses go wrong. The details that one should keep include the full name, email, postal address, and phone number. This way, any time you have new products or promotions on offer, you can send the information to all your current clientele.
Product bundles are a great way to upsell or cross-sell products to a customer. On the Instamojo platform, it is easy to create product bundles that gets shown to the customer when they are heading to the chekout page. This increases the chances of the customer of buying the entire bundle over just one product.
Outsource
When adopting marketing strategies for small businesses, you might not have the needed expertise in all areas that pertain to running a business. You might also not have enough resources to hire highly skilled professionals to work with you full-time. This is where outsourcing comes in.
Get other people to market your business for you.
From designing your website, logo, or even writing the content for your websites, there is a large base of freelancers ready to do the job for you at a fair price. This way, your business will be properly presented in order to increase the number of sales. Money invested in money gained.
Marketing on the Instamojo online store
Always remember that marketing strategies for small businesses, when done the right way, will boost your income. The ideas mentioned above will give you a head start.
An eCommerce website is a great place to implement all the above strategies. Just like these strategies, creating an online store is also affordable!
With Instamojo, you can get started for free and create a store to sell online.
With its affordable premium plans, you get features that help you enhance your marketing campaigns and bring in more customers.
Here are some powerful marketing tools and features that you can find on the Instamojo dashboard.
