How To Boost Your Sales With A Limited Marketing Budget

  Small businesses want to win as many customers as they can; achieving this is essential to their growth. But they don’t always have the resources to pursue the conversions that are required for their expansion. They often have to make do with limited marketing budgets. So it’s important that they deploy the funds that they have as efficiently as possible, and hope that it’s enough to meet their growth objectives.

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Thankfully, marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. There are a number of ways that businesses can reach their target audiences without spending a fortune. Some of these strategies are simple tweaks to well-known marketing strategies; others aren’t as widely used. But taken together, they can deliver results that help small businesses to meet their objectives. Here, we’ll discuss five approaches to marketing that SMEs can adopt to draw in leads that they can convert into paying customers.

Produce Quality Content

It will cost you little to create content that people in your target market will appreciate. It could be articles on your business’s blogs or videos that you share on social media. It could even be infographics that condense market or industry data into graphic, easily digestible forms. Whatever format your content takes, ensure that it’s something that answers questions that its consumers are asking, or at least is able to pique their interest and satisfy their curiosity. Of course, it should be something that’s related in some discernible way to your business and what it does. For example, if your business is a car dealership, you could provide content that answers questions about car maintenance, where to get quality car parts on the cheap, or some of the latest car models available in Nigeria. Such pieces will cast you as the go-to place for useful information about vehicles, and attract the sort of people who would want to buy a car from you.

Utilize Search Engine Optimization

Offering quality content to the public is great. But how can you ensure that it’s read by the people you create it for? Here’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. By optimizing your site for web search, you make it likely that it’ll rank high on search results pages. The closer to the top it is on such pages, the more often it will be clicked and viewed. There are quite a few things involved in optimizing websites and blogs for web search. One of them is the use of keywords in the written content you create. Keywords are the terms that users of the internet enter in their browsers when they want to search for something on the web. For instance, if they want to find a bakery in Minna (Niger State), they could enter the term ‘bakery in Minna’ in their browser’s search box. If you run a bakery in Minna and you’d like people searching for a bakery in that area to find it online, you could use the keyword ‘bakery in Minna’ a few times in the content on your website’s pages. This will increase the likelihood that it’ll rank close to the top of any online search result page, and in turn, increase the chance that it’ll be viewed by visitors.

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Leverage Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective strategies that businesses can adopt. It involves engaging existing customers and prospects via email, with the aim of eventually securing conversions from them (whether it’s registering for a conference, downloading a digital product, or making a purchase). The ratio of conversions to contacts on your email list will depend on how well you’ve designed and implemented your email marketing strategy. If it’s well planned and smartly executed, your email strategy could fetch you results that most other channels won’t. But before you begin shooting emails to your contacts, you’ll need to have a list of people you’ll be sending your emails to. You can build that email list in a number of ways, including asking visitors to your website to provide their email addresses when signing up for exclusive content.

Collaborate With Other Businesses

You may work with businesses that are not your competitors to market your products to their customers and target audience. This could work fairly well if such businesses sell items that are complementary to your product. Here’s an example. If you make and sell suits, you could collaborate with a cobbling business and market your suits to the people who typically buy their products. They’ll also offer their shoes to your audience. This need not cost either party any extra expense, as they are working together to promote their products to each other’s target market.

Maximize Your Use Of Social Media

There’s no doubt that paid marketing campaigns on social media can help businesses achieve great wins. But so can unpaid posts. When done right, your social media engagement can drive organic growth across your various social networks, and send increasing traffic to your online pages (if you link to them in your social media posts). Identify the times in which people are most active on social media, and post on (or close to) those times. Share content that’s relevant to your business and that’s informative and useful (refer to our point on producing quality content). You’ll want to use a variety of content types too: videos, text, images, and other formats that can be shared on your social media pages. Interact with people who respond to your posts, reshare positive comments about your product or service, and use relevant hashtags so that your posts get seen by more people.

Final Words

The fact that you have a limited marketing budget should not mean that you’re condemned to achieving mediocre results with it. If you take the right steps, you could score some major wins, including gaining a substantial increase in your sales and eventually growing your business. Featured Image Source: Business2Community

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This article was first published on 29th March 2022

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