Small Business Marketing: How to Maximize a Modest Budget
Here at Parklife, a huge part of our work is helping small business owners, who often come to us with a relatively modest budget for marketing. Still, we manage to turn their hard-earned dollars into marketing content that engages customers and ultimately helps their bottom line. How do we do it? In this article, I’ll share our best tips that we’ve picked up from working with small businesses over the years.
Stick to Your Strengths
A lot of marketing advice that you’ll find online focuses on maximizing your reach across multiple channels. These articles say that in order to succeed in your marketing efforts, you need to create a business account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest.
While this may be beneficial to larger companies, it’s not realistic for most small businesses, who barely have enough time or money to keep up with two or three social media channels (let alone six). Instead, small businesses should focus their marketing efforts on a few channels where they perform best. If you notice that your Facebook posts draw plenty of engagement, while your Instagram account has been stuck at two followers for a year, you may as well ditch the IG page and focus those efforts on Facebook instead.
The most important thing is to post consistently and often. If you find yourself letting some social media accounts fall by the wayside, that’s a sign that you need to refine your marketing efforts based on what you can actually keep up with. Abandoned social media profiles risk making your business look unprofessional, so it’s better to just delete them altogether. In short: When it comes to social media, do it right or don’t do it at all—there’s no reason why you need to be on a million platforms at once.
Repurpose Content
We’re always looking for ways to repurpose content for our small business clients, as it maximizes both the time and money you spend on marketing. For example, let’s say you record one five-minute video of your CEO discussing your mission for a YouTube video. That brief footage can then be transcribed and repurposed into one or more blog articles, as well as quote graphics for social media. It can also be cut into smaller clips, which are perfect for sharing on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
And there you have it—one brief recording session yields countless possibilities for content. You don’t need a giant marketing budget or lots of free time to create polished and professional marketing. You can apply this same principle to other media, too, like podcasting (transcribe it and turn it into multiple articles!) or blogging (find the best quotes in an article and push those on social).
Take Advantage of Freebies
Several major companies, including Google, Facebook, and Yelp, offer free credits to promote your company. When you take advantage of all of them, it adds up to a ton of free advertising for your small business.
Search engines like Google and Bing offer $100 or more in free advertisements when you first sign up. Facebook frequently runs promotions for its business pages, offering a certain amount of free credits to boost your post reach. Or, you can claim your Yelp business profile for free money to spend on ads.
Many of these promos have an expiration date, so just be sure to claim your freebies while you can—and keep checking back for future deals.
Work with a Marketing Partner
When you’re running a small business, every last dollar counts. We’ve worked with SMBs for years, and we understand the unique challenges and constraints that they face. That’s why small business owners deserve a marketing partner that they can trust to maximize their budget while delivering visible results.
If you’ve found that you just don’t have the time to create the kind of robust marketing efforts that you’d love to have for your small business, contact Parklife today. We’re passionate about helping business owners achieve their goals on any budget.
