The secrets to marketing your business with a limited budget in 2024
You just finished creating a stellar website for your new business, you have a fancy new email address under your domain name, and your payment portals are functioning perfectly. Now that all the hard work is done, all you need are people who want to buy from you.
But speaking from experience, these people do not just come crawling out of the woodwork. Marketing is where the real work—and spending—begins.
The good news is that there are some high-quality tactics you can use to market your business without totally breaking your budget—or your sleep cycle.
1. Build an organic social platform
Social media is intertwined in many of our daily lives. It can be a powerful way to talk to customers directly and get fast feedback. However, this doesn’t mean you should create an obligatory account on every social media platform and post un-strategized or quick content just so you can check the social media box. Instead, here’s what I recommend: create an account for each of the big four platform: Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook, and post some quality, genuinely helpful content, and analyze the results to see which platform performs the best. Then, once you see which ones are generating the most dividends, double down on your highest performers.
For lifestyle and clothing brands, there’s no question that it’s Instagram and TikTok. For social commentary and news-related businesses, it’s X. The point is, choose the platform that works best for your brand, and—while you shouldn’t ignore the other ones—put a special focus on growing your following on that one platform.
I mentioned quality content above—what does that look like, practically speaking? It depends on exactly what you’re selling, but the gist is this: find a problem or two that your target audience has and then solve those problems with your content. Sometimes the solution is your product itself, and other times it’s genuinely helpful video or written content from an expert like yourself.
2. Build an email list
The thought of an email list might put a sour taste in your mouth. But just because you get 50 unhelpful subscription emails in your inbox per day doesn’t mean your customers have to feel the same way about your email list.
Here’s an easy way to get started: build a pop-up window on your website’s home or landing page offering a hefty discount if the visitor simply submits their email address. And if you’re worried they’ll ignore the message, either make the discount bigger or write something like: “We promise to only send you emails you won’t immediately want to move to trash.” Have fun with it!
Email lists may feel outdated, but even in 2024, they boast consistently high ROIs. An email a week to your subscriber list will help, not hurt.
3. When you get your first customer, zone in on that person who bought from you
There are numerous bodies of research—and firsthand experience from business owners—suggesting that it’s always cheaper to sell again to an existing customer than to acquire a new one.
This doesn’t apply to all types of businesses. If you're a dentist who takes people’s wisdom teeth out, you’d be wasting your time marketing your services to the guy who just left your office with cotton in his mouth. But for most product-based businesses, and especially service-based businesses, people who’ve already done business with you are very likely to come back again
Here are a few strategies for enticing those existing customers even more:
Offer upsells or downsells, where you persuade your customer to purchase an additional upgrade or downgrade if you think you might lose them on the money issue.
Offer cross-sells, where you convince your customers that if they need to purchase that, they’ll need this slightly different product as well.
Offer bundle discounts, where customers can save money per product by buying more total products.
As I mentioned in the social media content section, just be smart about your strategy. What do your existing customers need, and how can you continue to meet those needs for them?
4. Find the biggest influencers of your target market and talk to them
This is a huge one, especially when it comes to growing your social media following.
You don’t have to start from zero followers and grow like an unhealthy houseplant only as people find you on the Explore page. Reach out to brands who are in the same industry. Making connections is productive, and you may be surprised at how easily collaborations can happen.
To get started, you want to make it as easy as possible for large influencers to work with you—eliminate every possible hassle or hidden cost that would prevent them from responding. I recommend making a spreadsheet of all the macro-influencers you want to reach out to and sending them your products or services for free, along with some suggestions on how you could collaborate and how the collaboration could benefit them.
What would you be more likely to respond to: a generic “We should collab” email, or a free product or service with a collaboration game plan already laid out that would help your business?
5. Start utilizing SEO early
SEO is daunting—I get it. One of the reasons it’s daunting is because it takes a long time to be effective—and that’s why you must get started on it early on in your business’s life.
The most important first step with SEO is to have a website. And to have a website, you need to have a web hosting provider. Thankfully, both of these can be had for surprisingly cheap.
Once that’s done, you can focus your attention on, among other things, blog posts and backlinks. How do these help with SEO?
For blog posts, the trick is to naturally include a variety of relevant search keywords, especially in the headings. I recommend using Google Trends or Ubersuggest to find the highest-performing keywords used by your competitors. Based on those keywords and the unique product or service your business provides, you can create a consistent stream of written content. The key is to answer questions and solve problems for your potential customers, while naturally sprinkling in those keywords.
Backlinks are simply links leading to your website, from other websites. The more of these inbound links your website has, the higher the esteem in which Google holds it. There are many, many ways to get started building backlinks—most involve collaborating with brands who could benefit from pointing customers to your site or using a full-on link-building service, like Profit Engine.
6. Leverage social proof and testimonials
How can you expect new customers to trust you with their money if you’ve never come through for anyone else before them? The answer is, you can’t—and they won’t.
If you have an existing customer base to allow this, I recommend sprinkling satisfied customer reviews throughout your product pages, and even making a separate “Testimonials” section on your website. If you have any big-name clients, include pictures of them with a quoted statement on their satisfaction with your products or services.
The same goes for social media. In general, the more you can get new customers to see how you’ve come through for other people just like them, the more likely they’ll be to trust you right off the bat.
definite winner here.
7. Create giveaways to expand your circle
A social media giveaway is like your very own personal lottery. Only instead of being paid in money, you’re paid in brand awareness.
Pick a hot product or service of yours, and announce on your most popular social media platform that you’ll give it away for free to one lucky person. But it doesn’t have to be all luck. Entrants can increase their chances of winning if they follow your brand, like the post, and tag friends in the comments.
Your page with just 100 followers may suddenly have a hot post with more likes and comments than you can count.
8. Texting
Above, I extolled the virtues of the old-fashioned email list—and in many ways, SMS texting is the cooler big brother of email.
SMS messages have a higher open rate than emails do—text messages are simply much more accessible at a moment’s notice. But because of this, many brands overdo it and end up getting blocked by their customers. Entrepreneur Gary Vee has this down to a science: he sends sales and marketing emails only once per week or so, and general positive and helpful content a bit more often.
This way, customers get the sense you want to help them more than you want them to buy from you—and this, ironically, leads to them buying from you.
9. Learn conversion rate optimization
What would you rather have: a million website visitors per month with 10 sales, or a thousand website visitors per month with 20 sales? Of course, if you had a million website visitors per month, you could make a ton of money by allowing other companies to run ads—but that’s not the point.
The point is that purchasing customers matter much more than potential customers. Conversion rate optimization is the science of getting as many website visitors as possible to buy something from you, as opposed to just stopping in.
It’s a wide field, and it takes into account everything from live chat options to ease of website navigation to website loading speed.
10. Video content is king
In 2024, short-form video content is indeed king. Blog posts and written content still have their place—but if you want to get your business to where the most people will see it the fastest, you’ll have to conquer the short-form video game.
In particular, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are the hotspots. Of course, you want to have some good production value for your videos. They should look clean, aesthetic, and professional, with clear video and audio quality.
That said, even the most professionally produced videos are not going to do well with the algorithms if people don’t find the content helpful. Answer a question, solve a problem, or even just make someone laugh!
Once you have more money to spend, you can even partner with a company like PowerHouse, which specializes in creating short-form video content for brands and creators.
Recap
Paying buckets of money to Google Ads is not the only way to market your new business. If you know what you’re doing and you don’t underestimate the power of a strong work ethic, a little money can go a long way.
Shoot me a message if you have any specific questions, or book a free consultation on how I might be able to help give your company a fresh look.