Marketing is vital for all businesses today irrespective of small or scale businesses. Marketing is also equally crucial to non-profit firms as well. Today leading companies are coming up with various new and innovative marketing strategies to market their products more widely. Marketing is not just limited to printing and television advertisements today but social media also plays a huge role in the marketing sector and a lot of business is gained through social media marketing itself as the reach of social media is quite widespread.
The cost of marking and paid social media advertisements may be really high and usually small business organizations cannot effort it. However, there are several other strategies wherein marketing can be done at a low budget reaching a considerable crowd. The following are some of the ways to market small-scale businesses.
Create eye-catching and exciting advertisements:
Yes, digital marketing is increasing day by day, but still, print media advertising has not lost its reach! This is the reason why you can still see big hoardings on busy streets and advertisements of leading brands in the initial pages of magazines and newspapers. All you have to do is create an eye-catching and exciting ad and more than half of your work is done there. Research has shown that an average person is engaged in an advertisement for anywhere from 3-8 seconds only. Print advertisements should be made in such a way that people stay involved in them.
Read Also How Web Design Can Improve Your Traffic and Online Sales
The tie-up with other relatively big businesses in the same niche:
If you are new in the market and want faster growth and recognization in the market, then tie-up with established firms in the market is a great option. Business collaboration can not only bring your business, but it will also make your brand or product known in the market. E.g., if you have a garden maintenance business then you can tie up with landscape designers or garden designers to boost your business.
Marketing through local sponsorship:
If you are running a small-scale business then before you target the market outside do not forget to target the local market. Many events are organized locally, and you can be a sponsor of any such event even on a small budget too. E.g., if there is a cricket tournament, you can sponsor the expenses of one team. Through this, all the local people attending that particular tournament will be now aware of your products and business.
Offering discounts and gift vouchers:
At the initial level of the market, the products you need to provide attractive discounts to your customers to attract them if you do not do so decidedly fewer people may turn to your products as there is a lot of competition existing in the market and the customer is the King. You can easily attract your targeted audience by providing various gift vouchers or free complimentary products.
Digital marketing:
Many new small businesses fear digital marketing as they think it’s quite expensive which is not! Digital marketing can be done on a low budget also, and you can reach your target audience easily through it. You can do digital marketing on your own or hire a freelancer or take agency services for it. Today you can even find many digital management companies online.
Social media marketing:
Social media marketing is very trending today. But if you are on a tight budget and cannot spend huge money on paid social media advertising do not worry at all! You can market yourself and promote your products for free too. You have to make your social media page and keep it updated regularly. Apart from this, there are several other strategies where you can promote your business for almost free on social media.
Online business and networking:
Today all business is done online, and people are shopping online on a large scale. This is the reason why listing your business online is so important. You can make your website or even sell your products on various sites. Coming networking business and networking go hand in hand, and the more you network, the more your business gains popularity.
Small-scale business marketing budget
To keep a balance between your business cost and marketing expenses, you need to prepare a proper plan and budget for marketing. As small-scale business works on a tight budget, not much part of the business capital can be spent on marketing. Ideally, an established business spends 10% of its business capital on marketing. However, the budget may change from organization to organization.
At an initial level, the small business organization is advised to spend 10-15 % of its budget on marketing as in the beginning a lot of marketing is to be done to make more and more people aware of your business. As the business flourishes and an expected outcome is gained, then this budget can be brought down to 8%-10%. In case, you fail to do the marketing budget management, and you can refer to various websites. You can assume the average marketing budgets based on your business scale, before making your plan.
Depending on the competition level and the expected outcome from various marketing strategies this budget can be increased or decreased accordingly. Also if you are introducing a new product in the market or making any innovation in your base product then at such point in time you also need to do extensive marketing and level up your marketing budget. If you do not do so even after making a good product it may fail only because it did not reach the targeted audience and not many people were aware of it.
Hence, not only marketing your business in the right way is important but also making an adequate budget for the same is equally important. According to changing marketing trends, competition, and customer demand, you need to keep making changes in your marketing strategies which indirectly will lead you to make changes in your marketing budget too.
Leave a Reply