7 Low-Budget Small Business Digital Marketing Ideas

Small businesses often have a low-budget marketing budget which can make promoting your business challenging. 

Digital marketing is a must-have for promoting your products or services, but optimizing your online assets is also critical to your business’ overall success.

1. Publish valuable content

Content marketing is a very effective marketing tactic that doesn’t require a lot of money. To best execute a content marketing strategy, it is important to not only understand your audience, but provide them with relevant, valuable content that helps solve their small business problems. 

It should be noted that Google prioritizes high-quality content that best answers the questions its users are asking. So great content makes your website more visible on Google and brings in more “organic” traffic (that you don’t need to pay for).

The best way to do this is to hire a content marketing professional who can write blog posts and website content that helps educate your audience through simple, easy-to-understand language and terms your audience can use to obtain answers to questions related to your products or services. 

2. Have a differentiating value proposition

If there’s little or no difference between you and your competition, why should a prospective customer be compelled to buy or work with you? Your value proposition is what will differentiate you from others in your market niche and help to convince prospects that you’re the provider they need.

What do you do better than anyone in the industry? Tell them in a concise, easy to understand statement and then communicate that message in all your marketing and advertising copy. 

3. Post videos on social media

Videos are especially great for demonstrating how to use or apply a product or service. Video marketing works in pretty much every industry. With some minor technical ability, do-it-yourself videos can be a no-cost way to take advantage of the benefits of using video marketing. Their are also low-cost ways small businesses can use video by using a digital marketing agency to help you connect with your audience such as creation of:

• Product demos
• Instructional videos and how-to’s
• Video testimonials from your best clients
• Interviews with your staff or industry experts
• Videos employing digital storytelling to tell a story about your product or service 

When crafting the message in your video, make sure you include a call to action (CTA) (e.g. Call Now, Learn More, Click here for your FREE XXX)  and then post the video on your website, YouTube, your social media channels and in emails to reach your target audience. 

4. Run Online Paid Ads

Organic traffic takes a while to build, and as a small business, you may want to also invest some of your marketing budget in pay-per-click ads (PPC). Professionally developed ad campaigns can be an economical boost that will target appropriate buyers for your products / services and complement  your organic traffic efforts.

Google Ads are helpful if you know that your target audience is searching the web for your product or solution. If they aren’t, you might consider social media ads instead. Individuals on social media have less immediate buying intent, but with highly targeted ads and enough impressions, you’ll gain the interest of your audience and most importantly, build your brand awareness with a larger audience. 

5. Promote an online contest or giveaway

Conducting a social media contest or giveaway is a smart and low-budget small business marketing idea that is easy to implement. The giveaway doesn’t need to be expensive but the number of participants and new potential leads you get will be well worth the price. 

There are numerous social media contests and promotional offers on the web so keep in mind the main objective of this tactic is to get registrants to like, follow, or tag your business, collect email addresses to further market to interested buyers and to increase your audience reach to as many potential clients as possible. 

6. Use email marketing to nurture leads

Getting traffic to your website does not mean that those visitors are ready to buy yet. Research shows that it can take at least 7 exposures to your business before a customer makes a buying decision. 

Email marketing is a critical part of your marketing toolkit. In fact, 73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.

This strategy is an easy, free, and scalable way to communicate with both new and existing customers.

Most small business owners don’t have tons of free time to devote to digital marketing, so consider using marketing automation to make your email marketing as cost efficient as possible.

7. Keep your website current by updating old content

Search engines like Google and Bing prefer content that is current. Content that has been more recently published usually gets a higher ranking than outdated pieces.

But if you’re only publishing new content, your old content is more likely to go unnoticed in the search results pages. You can avoid having to completely re-work blog posts and articles by creating more “evergreen” content that is not time-sensitive. Then have your content management professional just update the publishing date to notify the search engines that it is current information. 

Don’t forget to use social media to promote your content. Old content on your website has tons of potential and you can unlock it if you have it optimized in the right way.