You must allocate a considerable portion of your budget to marketing if you want to operate a successful small business. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, marketing costs should account for about 8% of your total sales.

To recognize the value in where your money and time are going, you also need to understand the whys of marketing.

One of the advantages of marketing for a small business is that it may help you reach out to potential consumers and build customer trust. You can also use marketing to learn more about your target market. By promoting, you can increase sales and ensure that your brand is remembered by your target market.

Nine innovative strategies to advertise your small business without breaking the bank are provided below with these considerations in mind.

1. Utilize promotional items

Small businesses can consider using promotional products as a tried-and-true, yet sometimes underutilized means of marketing. Reusable bags, can coolers, and T-shirts are a few examples of promotional items that may be useful to give away to customers in your company. Additionally, effective methods for promoting your company are branded hats, mugs, and gadget accessories.

The advantage of using products to sell your company is that consumers can see and use them daily, as opposed to digital marketing, which vanishes from their minds as soon as they leave your social media ad or website.

Products are concrete means of making sure people are thinking about you.

Employees can also receive promotional items so they can serve as brand advocates.

2. Conduct a competition on social media

Although using social media for marketing is nothing new, there are still innovative methods you can utilize that will help you stand out from the crowd.

Competitions never lose their attraction because people love the thought of maybe receiving stuff for nothing. You may offer a free product package or something else in exchange for social media activity.

To increase reach, ask your followers to like, comment, share, or tag others.

3. Distribute user-generated content via social media

User-generated content might be another method to stand out from other social media marketers on a budget. Due to the lack of the same sense of bias that comes with branded material, user-generated content is said to have a significant impact on purchasing decisions by about 79% of consumers.

You can offer incentives to your current consumers so they would post reviews, images, and videos of them utilizing your items. To observe the postings that people have made without your prompting, you can also frequently monitor social media.

You might be able to convince folks who are debating whether to buy from you if nothing else by sharing user-generated material.

4. Produce tutorial videos

When you take the effort to create films, you can share them in many ways and benefit greatly from them. Video marketing is effective across platforms. One strategy for producing video content is to focus on tutorials. You can provide advice on a particular subject or demonstrate how to use your items.

In addition to video reviews from happy customers, behind-the-scenes tours of your company, and co-hosted live streams, particularly with influencers from your sector, are all excellent forms of video content for promotion.

Explainer videos might resemble tutorials. It builds trust with your audience when you indirectly promote your business by imparting knowledge or information. Because you’re not simply going for the hard sell but giving them something of value, it establishes you as a leading expert.

5. Make money from trending topics

Being a part of trends, or even creating them, is the core of social media marketing. Alternatively, you might adopt popular trends and use them to market your own company.

You may, for instance, participate in existing discussions in forums while also promoting your company. Additionally, you can leverage festivals and yearly occasions to advertise your company.

6. Collaborate with additional small businesses

Working with other small businesses is a fantastic method to reach their audience and their motivation is increased because they will also reach yours. This may be done locally or online. There are many innovative things you can do when you work with another small firm, particularly one that shares your target market without directly competing with it. These things may end up costing you nothing or very little.

You may collaborate on a webinar or provide discounts to each other’s email lists, for instance.

7. Establish a program for customer referrals

If you employ your present consumers in this way effectively, they can be your ultimate marketing resource. According to a Nielsen report, 92% of consumers believe that referrals from friends and family are more useful than all other types of promotion, making word-of-mouth marketing crucial for small businesses.

A client referral program can help you boost word-of-mouth advertising and give it some structure.

Encourage your current customers, especially your devoted ones, to tell others about what they appreciate about your company. The ability to express gratitude to your current clients in this way will help to maintain their loyalty.

8. Create infographics 

It is simple and quick to create many forms of marketing content, including infographics, with contemporary design tools. Because they convey a lot of information and important data in an easily consumable manner, infographics are fascinating. They may be shared and are simple to grasp by a wide audience.

You may post infographics you create on a variety of social media channels, and if your audience finds your infographic compelling enough, it might even go viral.

9. Organize an event

Finally, think about holding an offline or online event. It doesn’t need to be extravagant. You might just arrange a seminar or invite a speaker who has something to do with your industry. You might be able to obtain some traditional PR in the form of news articles and backlinks to your website, which is advantageous for marketing and SEO.