Affordable marketing ideas for new businesses

It can be hard to know where to start with marketing – especially when you don’t have a mega budget behind you, but it is essential for new businesses and SMEs to help them reach their target audience and grow a successful brand.

While an enormous marketing budget is lovely to have, we can’t all be so lucky! Not to worry; there is plenty you can do to market your business without a serious spending spree.  With that in mind, here are five affordable marketing ideas for SMEs:

A great first step for marketing your business is to create and maintain active profiles on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Take a look at where your ideal customers are most active and focus your efforts here.

You need to ensure you post engaging content regularly. While your social media content should absolutely include product/service updates, customer testimonials, and straight up adverts, you won’t build an audience with this alone. You’ll need to consider what your ideal audience wants to see – think pieces, educational content, funny videos, product demonstrations, or behind-the-scenes glimpses of your business.

Not sure what to post? Whatever is working for your competitors is a good place to start. While you don’t want to copy your peers, you can let their popular content guide you while you work out what will get the most engagement for you.

If you work in one physical location, you should optimise your website for local search by including relevant, location-specific keywords in your content – for example, a plumber or electrician could include a list of the towns they cover.

You should also claim your Google My Business listing and add accurate business information like opening times, contact info, and images. Encourage satisfied customers to leave online reviews, as they can significantly impact local search rankings.

Build an email list of interested customers and prospects. You can do this manually with the help of LinkedIn, search engines, and a bit of sleuthing but it is a time-consuming process. If you don’t have the resources to focus on building your own lists, you can purchase access or even engage firms who specialise in finding contact information. Just be sure to check out their GDPR credentials!

When you have your list(s), you can send newsletters, promotions, and updates to increase engagement and awareness of your business. They key is to share useful content at regular intervals, so your audience knows what to expect.

Email marketing tools like Mailchimp offer free plans for small lists and can be a great for building good-looking, low-cost email marketing campaigns.

Start a blog on your website and regularly publish valuable and relevant content related to your industry. If you have the skills in-house, you can also create informative videos, infographics, and ebooks to share on your website and social media.

Where possible, try to optimise your content for search engines (SEO) to improve organic visibility. This doesn’t mean stuffing in a bunch of random search terms – Google is far too clever for that these days. Instead, think about the subjects that are relevant to your intended audience and deliver educational and/or engaging content about these topics.

It is important to monitor the performance of your marketing efforts and adjust your strategies based on the results.

Each month, you should gather data from your marketing channels – think website visits and conversions, email campaign open and click rates, or engagement on your social media channels – and use this to build a marketing report. This will help you to see where your efforts are having the most impact (and where you might want to adjust your approach).

Over time, you can use these insights to help you spot patterns, adjust your marketing strategy, and refine your marketing activity to maximise your budget’s effectiveness.

Remember, the key to successful marketing for SMEs is consistency.

Overcommitting yourself can do more harm than good so, if you don’t have the resources right now, you should focus on one or two marketing activities that you can do well, regularly. You can always grow your activity later.