Not every business has a seemingly-endless amount of money to spend on marketing.  If your business is small or medium-sized, you probably need to make the most of every dollar. However, a limited budget doesn’t mean you have to skimp on your marketing efforts.  It just means you need to market smarter. Let’s take a look at five strategies to help you get the biggest bang for your marketing buck.

1. Play To Your Strengths

It’s normal to want to change up your marketing campaigns, assuming that a new, fresh approach will attract more customers.  When you’re working with a small budget, the trial-and-error method isn’t your best bet.  If you’ve hit upon a strategy that works, save money and stick to it as long as you can. It’s also not expensive to run A/B tests with tools like unbounce. When you have a strategy that works, optmize it to the max.

2. Automate Where Possible

It’s not always money that’s tight for a small business – time is another limited resource.  Automating some of your everyday marketing tasks can free up a big chunk of time.  Instead of tending to each of your social platforms separately, you can access all of them from a single place such as Hootsuite.  This lets you compare the performance of your campaigns across various platforms and automate much of your social-media activity with a single click.  When you’re not bogged down with these routine tasks, you can focus on the big picture and improve your overall marketing strategy.

3. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

You probably know the “three Rs” as ways to take better care of the Earth’s resources; the same concepts can also help you make better use of your content:

  • Reduce:  It’s important to post new content regularly, but more content isn’t always better – what’s important is squeezing the most value out of each piece of content.  Be sure to share your content on each of your social platforms.  Add photos to increase visibility and engagement, and choose your hashtags carefully. Go for quality content over quantity.
  • Reuse: Don’t reinvent the wheel – use what you have.  For example, if you invested in a white paper for your business, use research from that paper to spin off new content items.  Each section of that paper can be turned into a blog post, and key insights can be the foundation of a webinar.
  • Recycle: When you’re out of ideas for new topics, try recycling older content that performed well. The key to making this work is to freshen up and update with any new data, developments and perspectives.

4. Focus On Engagement

Engaging with your customers and community is inexpensive in monetary terms, but it is time consuming. It can, however, reap massive rewards down the line.  There are a number ways to put your brand out there and become known as an expert in your industry:

  • Create accounts on each of the major social platforms and maintain an active presence on each one. Use COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere), and automate delivery.
  • Curate and share great content from others in your field, and be sure to comment on that content.
  • Reach out to influential people in your field and offer to do a guest post for their blog
  • If you can’t afford to attend conferences and networking events in your industry, then follow the events live logging, and share key insights to boost your business’s visibility.

5. Apply for Business or Industry Awards

If you’re looking for an easy, free way to boost your brand’s credibility and increase sales, try applying for business awards in your industry.  Winning any of these “best of the best” honors, which usually gets you a badge to place on your website and social media accounts, can speak volumes to your potential customers.  A few awards even include a small monetary prize that you can add to your marketing budget.

Tying It All Together

A larger marketing budget doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.  Optmize the srategies you can afford to employ, generate more revenue, and incrementally grow your marketing budget to support your growing business.