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Dollar Wise MarketingBy Kim T. Gordon Are you strapped for funds and looking for great ways to get the word out about your business? No matter your budget, there's always a marketing tactic to fit. It just takes creative thinking and some marketing know-how. So even if you're bootstrapping, here are six marketing tactics you can use to keep your costs low and still make a big impact. 1. Cut Production Costs Customers will make instantaneous decisions about your company based on the look of your marketing materials. You can save money when creating a family of high-quality tools by having them designed and written as a group and supplied to you on disk. Then you can further reduce your costs by printing the materials that require the same paper and ink colors together, or you can print only vital tools, such as your company brochure, and hold the others until your budget increases. 2. Combine Sales with Marketing Sales tactics -- one-on-one interaction with prospects -- are often less costly than marketing. For example, instead of mailing 10,000 direct mail packages to a rental list of businesses, you could reduce your costs by developing your own smaller in-house prospect list, contacting them first by telephone, and following up with literature. Despite a greater investment of time, your out-of-pocket costs would be lower and you might even get better results. 3. Substitute Public Relations for Advertising Suppose you need to reach a national audience through specific trade publications, but you can't afford to advertise with enough frequency to be effective. Consider creating a public relations program targeting the same media. While coverage won't be guaranteed, any editorial you land will carry significant weight with readers. 4. Build a Referral Program Do other professionals or area businesses regularly meet with your prospects? If so, you can cut marketing costs by targeting them instead of your larger prospect group. Mortgage brokers, for example, often build referral relationships with real estate agents and provide mortgage calculators with their contact information to use with prospective homebuyers. To take advantage of this form of marketing, identify your potential referral groups and call on key individuals or businesses, then supply them with tools to use with your prospects. 5. Let Others Market for You Suppose you want to offer a product to a specific target audience but can’t afford a major campaign to reach them on your own. You can use "place-based" marketing to reach your target audience. In Bringing Home the Business, I have a case history of a landscape designer who specializes in water features. To reach his target audience, he installed a large display at a local plant nursery so all the shoppers there would be exposed his work. 6. Create Buzz Never discount the power of word-of-mouth to get your business off to a flying start. The key is to get customers involved. When a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco offered free lunch for life to anyone who got a tattoo of their Jimmy the Corn Man logo, 39 people accepted the challenge and the restaurant got coverage in USA Today and other major media -- all for just the cost of burritos. Get In-depth Coaching on this Topic>>Kim T. Gordon's columns and articles are read by more than 3 million small-business owners each month. She is a small-business expert and the author of four books, including Maximum Marketing, Minimum Dollars: The Top 50 Ways to Grow Your Small Business. Copyrighted material. May not be reproduced in whole or part without expressed permission from the author. |
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