Nowadays, firms spend a great deal of advertising money to develop their market share. Can they bear the brunt of minimizing their budget and still become successful? Low-budget issues force advertisers to opt for non-standard marketing tools. What to expect from those?

1. Build up your content

Content marketing, newsletters, blogs, podcasts, website articles and more are today’s main marketing instruments, while social media like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat complete the list. The mentioned tools may be only suitable for the patient ones, as results do not come immediately. On the other hand, content marketing can help support your objectives. To start with, develop a product or service that fulfils a customer need. What might seduce them to choose your product? By identifying your target audience, you can describe the profile of the average target audience member. Try to formulate advertising messages which relate to their tastes and interests.

2. Co-marketing

You advertise a company which returns your brand in return. In practice, the execution all depends on your partnering. For example, one can get a discount card for the local furniture store by visiting the nearby beauty parlour. While having a manicure, a client may chitchat about her plans to buy a new coffee table. By endorsing the furniture store to its client, the beauty parlour makes sure that she receives a discount on the coffee table. There may be advertising on both of your websites or more.

3. Client recommendation

How does this fly? To encourage your clients, send them a coupon or discount card to repeat their order. Your client can share the offer with their friends. When you do this regularly, it enhances them to buy from you more often.

4. Car fleet advertising

If you have one or more company cars, you can invest some money and create an advertising poster and stick it to the rear window. Another option might be to place the company logo on your cars, but this probably cost more.

5. Training your staff.

As an example, customer services and sales staff should offer your customers additional goods and services, which will increase your revenue. E.g., when a visitor to a cafe orders a coffee, a tea or a cappuccino, the waiter should ask what dessert they prefer, this may boost the cafe’s revenue by 15 to 35%. Statistics show how well this approach works in the Hotel and Catering Industry.

You can raise sales by improving the copy or design of your advertising, by writing a media plan, building a sales funnel, setting-up loyalty schemes, training personnel and more. There are many other ways, like seminars and webinars. Of course, all these free tools have one thing in common. There needs to be someone responsible, and the execution will be only free of charge when the entrepreneur does this himself, while it may be tedious work which takes time.

One does not need much money to set up effective advertising, but it does need perseverance, creativity, and patience.