How Can I Do Marketing With Little Money?

Why did the entrepreneur with empty pockets start a marketing campaign selling mirrors?

Because he believed that even when he had nothing, he could still reflect success!

OK, that was cheesy, but when it comes to marketing for business owners, a small budget isn’t going to stop us from achieving our goals. We get creative and come up with low cost marketing ideas for small businesses that can blow big business marketing with a million dollar budget out of the water.

How much does an average marketing campaign cost?

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, B2B businesses typically spend less than B2C businesses. Reports over the last few years share that small businesses can spend an average amount of anywhere between 2-11% of revenue on marketing. (Here’s one such report from Mailchimp.) Learn from an expert Chief Financial Officer on setting a realistic budget in our article “How do I market my business on a tight budget?”.

To help you get a sense of a monthly cost, Crafted Voice clients invest between $250-$2,000 monthly for Concierge, or do-it-for-you, marketing services such as blogging, social media, newsletters, event postings, etc. 

Concierge strategy work averages between $4-6,000 and includes developing customer personas, brand voice guidelines, competitive research, and customer journey mapping.

The beautiful thing about nimble small businesses is that they can mix and match marketing efforts and services that work for their workflow, budget, and goals. For example, you might need expert guidance when it comes to the strategy work, but have the bandwidth to execute the strategy in-house. At Crafted Voice Communications, we tailor our services to meet your exact needs and budget, offering DIY resources, do-it-with-you services (we do the work together), and concierge services (we do the work for you) so that you have the exact marketing support you need to succeed. Learn more about our services and book a consultation here.

How can I do marketing with little money?

If you are looking for the best low budget marketing campaigns for small business, you should take a creative break and watch the below social media influencer summary and response to a low cost marketing campaign that Burger King ran back in 2018. No, Burger King is not a small business, but this type of creative thinking can be leveraged by a business of any size to tap into new and fresh ideas.

Here’s what happened: Burger King strategically “liked” several influencers’ tweets from 2010 and they took notice. After posting screenshots about their confusion on what the heck Burger King was doing, the fast food chain revealed that “some things from 2010 are worth revisiting, like your old tweets. And funnel cake fries.” They cleverly used the social media attention to promote their new(ish) funnel cake fries. They garnered millions of impressions from this campaign that cost them zilch!

Watch this video from influencer CaseyNeistat as he explains his flabbergasted appreciation in a unique way.

Can I do digital marketing without money?

Zero budget digital marketing strategies are easier to pull off than strategies that rely on more traditional forms of marketing, such as mailers, billboards, radio and TV ads, and print media ads. These require a large budget and usually have a low conversion rate.

Digital alternatives include listing your business in online directories, posting events to free local calendars and forums, leveraging organic social media, and getting creative with word of mouth and affiliate marketing.

To measure and track effectiveness of these marketing activities, you should set up a utm link strategy. A UTM link places a code behind the original URL that tracks the number of times a link is clicked. Google Analytics offers a free campaign URL builder that you can use to build your links. Just be sure to keep all of your campaign URLs organized! 

How to do marketing without money

The best low budget marketing campaigns are those that take into account their target audience. If you don’t have any money to spend on marketing, you’ll have to spend your time instead. That means doing the work to know your target audience inside and out: what motivates them, what are their challenges, what problem you can help them solve, their buying habits, where they hang out, and more. 

Once you know them well, then spend the time writing key messages directly to your target audience, and then share the tailored messages in the places where they will find them. Knowing your audience first is key to being as efficient and effective as possible. After all, if you aren’t spending cash, but instead investing your time, you are still “spending” something. Time is money!