She's Busy AF

EP 135 | How to Market Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

• Lauren Loreto

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Strapped for cash but overflowing with ambition? In this episode, I'm talking through marketing strategies that don’t require a Scrooge McDuck vault of gold to get started. This is a quick and simple guide to cost-effective growth, and in this episode of She's Busy AF, I break down how to expand your reach from zero to hero with a budget that's less 'Wolf of Wall Street' and more 'Babe the Blue Ox'.  Join me as we explore the nooks and crannies of guerrilla marketing, where hustle meets strategy, and where every penny—or lack thereof—is put to work. Forget what you thought you knew about marketing; it’s time to get busy, get creative, and grow with tactics that are as affordable as they are effective.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back to another episode of she's Busy AF, a podcast where we help creatives, entrepreneurs, leaders, marketers, smash barriers and scale. I'm your host, lauren Loretto. I'm the founder of Brand Good Time. We are a web development and content marketing agency, and so you know that's where I get the snow how. So, anyways, today's episode, guys, I'm keeping it simple, really, really simple, because I know that there are times when you're looking at your marketing budget, or perhaps you don't have a budget and you're just like I don't know, I just need to market. That happens to big or small. So today we are looking at very low budget marketing tactics and, while this does have a little bit of a focus on more B2B based businesses, I think B2C can learn from this as well. So, if you are B2C, this is a quick episode, so stay tuned in, and we're going to start with $0. We're going to go up to $1,000. So this is relatively low, low, low, low budget tactics that you can try. I'm going to give a little bit of detail into each and what I suggest, and that's it. Like I said, it's going to be quick, so, without further ado, let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

Okay, first things first. Do you have $0? You have $0 to contribute to your marketing budget, meaning you can't I don't want to say can't afford, but it's not in your wheelhouse right now to spend money on marketing and you all you have is time. So, and even if you don't have time, you're making time because you know you need to market your business. So $0, I want you to try these things. One is daily thought leadership posting to LinkedIn daily, so it's sitting in front of your computer on a daily basis and being a thought leader on the platform. What does being a thought leader mean? It means taking your expertise and what you know in the world, of what you do, and talking about it with your opinion, your radical views about it perhaps not radical, but it's posting to LinkedIn and LinkedIn. And why LinkedIn? Especially if you are B2B, linkedin is a platform where you are going to reach your ideal clients. So that is tip number one. Tip number two for $0, straight up, cold outreach. You can also do this on LinkedIn. You can do this on other platforms too. I know that there are a couple of lead buying list platforms that you don't have to actually spend money on Initially. You can do some like free trials and get a couple leads lists and reach out to people who are in need of certain things within certain demographics. Now a lot of this comes back to obviously knowing your ideal audience and having that documented, so make sure you have that in order before you begin any cold outreach.

Speaker 1:

I've seen and personally experienced a lot of effective cold outreach. While I may not have been ready at the time to hire someone who's reached out to me in a cold type of way, I think there's very crafty ways to do this. A lot of it is just providing your expertise. If you're going to reach out to someone via email and you say, hey, this is, this is one that worked really well for me, they're reaching out and saying, hey, I see you're a marketing agency and I see you offer XYZ. Did you want to potentially outsource some of this or work, or you considering it to? You know, bring more of an expert in on that part of the process. So some of it's doing research on the company you're reaching out to, but the other part is just inserting yourself and saying, hey, I have varying rates at this amount. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I would love to get on a call and chat through this, not saying that's the best way to do cold outreach, but cold outreach is a free way to get in front of people.

Speaker 1:

Another thing you can do is daily educational videos to TikTok. So if you are someone who likes being in front of the camera, tiktoks a great platform for awareness, maybe not necessarily conversion in a P to B space, but it is a really great way to Get in front of your audience with the right algorithm, with the right hashtags, or the right leveraging of an algorithm with the right hashtags and Talking about a subject, so very similar to what you would do on LinkedIn. I would think you could repurpose that into video, make it short, sweet, attention grabbing and post that over to TikTok. So those are some zero dollar, low budget ideas. Now, if you have $500 here, a couple things you can try. One is you can upgrade that cold outreach the platform you're working with. Again, I've been looking into a platform called instantly and and I've signed up for a trial, but like just have not had the time to sit down and like really, really get into it. But there are many platforms like that where you can plug in your ideal client Demographics and get a list of those people and start to figure out how to infiltrate them. So if you have $500, you could upgrade that platform and get access to more of their tool and maybe start to leverage it for the cold Outreach for you. It can do it for you.

Speaker 1:

You can also develop a very high quality case study deck. So maybe you are hiring someone to help you develop a case study or develop a deck, and that is really really important. Especially in the B2B space, people want to see proof in the pudding. So developing a case study deck and putting your focuses on that bottom of funnel effort, which is proof, is Going to help you definitely close more sales Because, again, people want to see the proof I get. I get off calls all the time where they're like can you send us an example of something You've done similar to what you're proposing all the time? And with websites, that's so easy. With content marketing, we have to do a little bit more of like a case study for our clients to show them like, hey, here's all the efforts we put in to get XYZ results and so, yeah, we're constantly updating those case study decks. Another thing you can do is start a weekly newsletter. So perhaps you invest in an email marketing tool, you invest in some graphics for that, for your newsletter, and you're developing the strategy for it. That's another thing you can do.

Speaker 1:

And lastly, you can attend a local industry conference. $500 May not get you to something like inbound, which is a huge marketing conference in Boston in September, but it can get you into some more local maybe localized chamber events or localized Conferences in your industry, and I always recommend having a strategy with that. Don't just show up at these conferences and walk around and maybe be shy and not many people have a strategy for it. Maybe look up some people who might be going beforehand, do some outreach there, try and plan to make some connections while you're at that event and, yeah, obviously have a good time at the event. But attending a local industry conference is another great way to get in front of your ideal audience. Okay, the next thing in the last one is $1,000. So if you have $1,000, obviously upgrading everything I just talked about in one way or another Is one way you could do that, but some other ways are running a retargeting campaign.

Speaker 1:

So what do I mean by that? If you get significant traffic to your website and by significant traffic to your website, let's just say anything over 500 hits a month to your website. You can run retargeting campaigns if you have appropriate software and tools in place to do so. By that I mean pixels or, but mainly it's mainly pixels, like a Facebook pixel and that a pixel or like a Google pixel To make sure you're capturing the data of people hitting your website and then retargeting them on other platforms. So, yes, I am talking about paid advertising, I'm talking about ad spend here, but we've all been victim to this. You go to Nike, comm or really any website these days. You look at something, you leave. Next thing you know you're on a social platform and you're getting an ad for that. So it's the same situation here. Service-based businesses can leverage this just as much as product-based businesses. It's just reminding people what they were looking at for their infiltration, for their brand awareness. Get crafty with these. We are always here to help if you need any concepts or whatever, but retargeting campaigns can be really, really, really beneficial to a business, especially if you have a low budget and you're willing to try. Alright.

Speaker 1:

Partnering with micro-influencers is another great thing you can do, especially if you are product-based but sometimes not even Think about someone who's on LinkedIn, who's a thought leader in their industry who's adjacent to what you do. If you are a tech platform and you want to partner with a micro-influencer maybe you're sponsoring their newsletter, or maybe you're sponsoring a post that they put up it's a great way to get in front of more people. We love micro-influencers and working in that capacity. They don't have to be galey alex if anyone knows who that is or just anyone with a huge, massive million dollar, millions of following Not million dollar. Again, words are hard. Micro-influencers can also still be just as beneficial, especially if you're in a niche industry, because people who are following them are going to be niched as well.

Speaker 1:

And then, lastly, create a referral program. The reason why this costs a little bit of money is because setting up affiliate platforms or referral program platforms can be costly and you want to do it the right way, so you want to invest in the right tools to help you do that. You want to invest in a lawyer who can help you draft a contract for it, but referral programs can be absolutely incredible. We have a couple ourselves and they work really well for us in terms of marketing, getting in front of our new audiences, stuff like that. So those are what those are. This is what you can do with $0, $500 or $1,000.

Speaker 1:

If you need a strategy that fits your budget and capacity as a brand if you're someone who's like I have 0, 500 or 1,000, we can help you craft that strategy. So we focus on the full funnel and not just short-term tactics, because sustainability really is everything. So we're looking at top of funnel how do people find you, middle of funnel how do you nurture them and bottom of funnel how do they ultimately convert with you? And we help you with tactics to support all of those things and can fit most budgets for that. And we consider your capacity, because we know you're already busy, so capacity is huge. We're not going to throw a plan at you that we don't think that you can sit down and readily accomplish. And we also really give a crap about budget because we know funds are not always endless and maximizing dollars, especially in this economy, is key, key, key.

Speaker 1:

So if any of these tactics grabbed your attention or you're like I don't have much of a budget going into this summer or even any at any point during the year, and I'd love some eyeballs on my brand, understanding my audience and figuring out what are some best tactics to get in front of them and convert more business. We're here for you and you can learn more about this at the link in our show notes, or you can head to our website brand good time dot com to learn more. I hope this was helpful for you, albeit very quick and snappy. I hope some of these tactics spark some ideas for you and that you are able to make the most of them. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of she's Busy AF. I'll see you on the next one.