Doing More With Less: Savvy Strategies for Low Cost Marketing
You’re an entrepreneur with an incredible product or service ready to be unleashed. But you have little to no budget for marketing. What’s the plan?
Our coach Kuldip ‘Kooks’ Sahota is our resident marketing expert. He explains “marketing is lead generation. It’s essentially someone putting their hand up and saying ‘yes, I’m interested in what you’re doing!”
He suggests people start by creating a written marketing plan. This can be a simple one-pager: “Target audience; a desired number of leads; identify the time and resources you have; create a plan for showcasing the value of what you’re selling – and away you go”.
Step one: invest in yourself and your people
“The best investment you can ever make is in yourself”, says Kooks.
If your strategy involves DIY marketing on a budget, put as much money as you can afford into training. “Be honest with yourself. If you don’t know what you’re doing, learn”, is Kooks’ advice.
If you can afford to invest in a training course or buy some books, do that and get some baseline knowledge. That way, you know that the money you put into implementing your marketing strategy will be well spent.
“Get 50 hours of learning under your belt; you can do that in a month very easily,” Kooks explains. But, the stumbling block Kooks says he often comes across when coaching clients is their lack of self-discipline. “Be disciplined and make the time to consistently work on training, even if it’s twenty or thirty minutes a day.”
Kooks’ top tip for low-cost marketing training is to head online. There are plenty of free online courses, podcasts, and social media accounts where experts freely share high quality advice. “You can totally transform your thinking for free!” he says.
Step two: understand your target market and your audience
A “target market” refers to a broad group of potential customers a business aims to reach based on demographics and characteristics. A “target audience” is a specific segment within the target market, focusing on the people most likely to engage with a particular message or product. It’s a big circle (target market) with a smaller circle inside (target audience).
When it comes to making a success of a low-cost marketing budget, understanding your market and audience is critical. Kooks advises that you must be crystal clear on who you’re communicating to – and why. “Know your target market and then define that audience as much as you possibly can,” he explains. “You can’t say your product is for ‘everyone’ – there are eight billion people on this planet”.
Understanding your target audience(s) will mean you’ll avoid making costly mistakes if you’re already stretching your marketing budget. Knowing who you’re communicating to and where each target audience gets their information from will mean you can narrow down your tools and tactics.
For instance, if you’re targeting an audience that attends a particular conference every year, reads a particular magazine or loves a certain podcast, spending your money here makes much more sense than using generic Facebook ads targeting some age and income demographic.
“By understanding who you’re talking to – and how – you’ll get way more bang for your buck”, says Kooks.
Step three: tell people why they should trust and value your business
In Kooks’ experience, there are two main reasons people won’t buy from you: trust, and perceived value. “You need to build trust, then communicate to potential customers that others already trust you,” Kooks explains. “Make the most of free tools like Google Reviews, Trustpilot Reviews and customer testimonials. Be open, honest and transparent about your products and services.” And, it’s all about people – if you can, film yourself or your team talking about your products or services. Put a face to what you’re selling!
The second reason people won’t buy from you is that they don’t see the value in what you’re selling. Kooks’ top tip for effectively communicating value is to work out your value proposition: a clear, concise statement that tells customers what unique benefits your product or service offers and why it’s better than the competition.
Once you have these ready – use them! “Your brand story, your value proposition, and why people should trust you are consistent messages that’ll need to go everywhere: your website, your emails, your social media, your packaging.” Kooks’ top tip for building trust is consistency – do it well and do it often.
Step four: measure, evaluate, improve
If you’re implementing a low-cost marketing strategy, the last thing you want to do is waste the little money you have. You want to be able to maximise every penny you spend.
But this, Kooks explains, is where many businesses doing DIY marketing on a budget trip up. “They’ve done their upskilling and thinking work; now it’s time for digital campaign execution week one. They post some videos, some content on LinkedIn – and then they leave it and move onto the next week, rather than looking back at the data and the performance of their content.” Essentially, they’re never working out if there’s been a return on their investment.
Knowing what you want from a particular piece of content or the wider plan will help you understand which metrics will be most helpful when evaluating whether your spending has been worthwhile. If your campaign objective is brand awareness, you want high views and impressions. If your campaign’s call to action is designed to get people to sign up for something – like a subscription – then a high conversion rate will be more important than the number of people who saw the content.
The metrics available to businesses nowadays are plentiful; each social media network provides an abundance of analytics for free. Tools like Zapier and ChatGPT are highly recommended by Kooks when it comes to deciphering the numbers – you can input data and get a quick, automated report or summary.
But measuring and evaluating doesn’t have to be quantitative; it can be qualitative, too. Call your family, friends and peers, and ask them to be brutally honest. “Get a group of people that really care about you and say, “I won’t take offence – how can I make this better?” Kooks advises.
Once you know what’s working and what isn’t and how to improve, you can adjust your strategy and tactics and enhance future marketing material.
Step five: done is better than perfect
It might seem like a counter-intuitive suggestion when discussing low-cost marketing and stretching your marketing budget, but Kooks’ final tip is that done is better than perfect: “Don’t worry initially about your marketing being perfect. Just create something and put it out there. Then test, measure, and evaluate. Be unemotional about it; identify what to improve and implement it”.
While it might be difficult if your budget is small and rapidly dwindling, try not to see failure as a negative. In Kooks’ opinion, “it’s really important that some plans fail in marketing and business. Failure is like the cheat code that tells you what you need to improve.”
And the good news is, if you’ve follow the advice from step four, you’ll have measurable data to help you establish what works and what doesn’t – so when something fails, you can use it to improve the next attempt.
Low-cost marketing for big long-term results
Implementing a low-cost marketing strategy needn’t mean minimal results. Take the time and effort to understand your market and audience; build trust and identify how to communicate your value; be objective and consistent with evaluating your work; and learn from your failures.
Quick and affordable marketing tactics can positively impact your business long term. Don’t feel worried or like you’re instantly set up to fail if you don’t have a hefty marketing budget – if you plan well, follow the data and be tenacious, you’ll see results.
And, if you’re still unsure how to successfully plan and implement low-cost marketing strategies within your business, we’re here to help. Book a free coaching call with one of our experts, and together we can demystify the world of low cost marketing.
