8 great ways to stretch a miniscule marketing budget

There are signs that the UK economy is slowly picking up, but in the meantime how can marketers get the most from a limited – on in many cased TINY – marketing budget? Here are our top tips:

• Spend plenty of time planning, so that every marketing activity carried out really will be effective.

• Invest in content and use it multiple times – a print article, which can also be used on your web page, outreached as a blog post on other sites, included in email, and edited down for use as social media posts

• Use social media to grow and communicate to your audience at low cost. Put in place a strategy to build and constantly engage with your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn followings. This really is a cost-effective way to market products and services, but you do need to track results over time and find out what works best for your market.

• Always perform a marketing audit on the previous year. This way you can make sure your spend is working as hard as possible for you.

• Put in place sharp KPIs to measure the success or otherwise of your marketing activities.

• If your digital marketing skills aren’t up to scratch look online for help from specialists who cater specially for SMEs – for example, www.leadspring.co.uk. An area you may need help with is SEO (search engine optimisation) with a focus on being optimized for local search.

• There are also free or low-cost marketing training schemes for small businesses. For example, the National Skills Academy for Environmental Technologies has produced a free, online sales and marketing plan generator. http://www.nsaet.org.uk/news_events/free-sales-and-marketing-tips-for-smes

• Hit the phone to boost your B2B client base. It may sound like an old-fashioned option, but there can still be value in making a list of companies you’d like to work for and contacting them directly.

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