Your Business: Marketing on a Budget

As a business, it’s imperative to get your name out to potential clients and customers to improve your brand recognition. Brand recognition is an important part of growing your company. When people need something, they usually go with the first service or product they can think of. The best way to be the first name to come to mind is effective marketing. Marketing can be difficult, even for larger companies, but it’s especially challenging when you’re on a tight budget. We have come up with a few ideas to help you improve your branding at little to no cost.

Directory Listings

Directories are a great place to start and there are a ton of them out there. It is not advisable to list your business on every directory you come across. It just would not be worth the time you would have to put in. There are a few places where listing your business would be very beneficial.

Google My Business

Google is used by practically everyone, and listing with them will place your business in their Local Search and on Google Maps. This is a fairly obvious directory, but if you haven’t already listed your business here it is a good idea to do so. Listing with Google will get your brand out to a wide variety of potential clients.

Yelp

Founded in 2004, Yelp was created to help users find quality local businesses and has held a major internet presence for years. Yelp has over 70 million unique visitors every month. Business owners and managers can set up a free account where they can post pictures and contact their customers, mostly by replying to user reviews.

Bing

Founded by Microsoft, Bing may have trouble contending with Google. It does, however, boast a strong and numerous user base. Listing with Bing on their business portal offers a lot of the same benefits as listing with Google, just with Microsoft at the helm.

Merchant Circle

Bing is to Google, as Merchant Circle is to Yelp. Winner of the 2007 “Newcomer of the Year” by AlwaysOn Media, this site will help develop and improve your online presence, they connect consumers with local business and offer a variety of tools for both you and your clients.

Yellow Pages

Tracing their origin back to well before the internet was around, Yellow Pages has been a staple directory to for local businesses for over a century. The offer free tools to increase your business’ visibility online. Yellow Pages offers premium services as well as free directory listings.

Social Marketing

Social media is used by just about everyone. Companies, both large and small, should look to have an active social media presence. Wendy’s, as an example, has mounted an insanely successful social media campaign that has netted them a huge growth in brand recognition. While you may not have as large of a budget as Wendy’s, you can still improve your online presence through social media. There are a couple of places you can go to help you develop a more consistent and tangible social media impact.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite provides users with a central hub for all their social media. They offer a free solution to the hassle of actively controlling multiple social media accounts. Schedule posts and monitor account activity to better understand your effectiveness. Hootsuite furnishes your business with all the tools you need to improve your social marketing.

Falcon.io

Falcon.io does not offer free services, however, they are generally rated as a better service than Hootsuite. If you have the extra money to spare and are looking for a good way to manage your social marketing, this might be the service for you.

Other Ways to Improve Marketing

The sections above offer multiple solutions to the same issues, here we will go over a few other ways that you can improve your marketing on a budget. So let’s dive right in.

Vistaprint Business Cards

Vistaprint offers a great discount on their products to new customers. You can get 500 standard business cards for $10. Don’t let cost stop you from ordering business cards, they are an invaluable tool you can use to spread your brand and give potential customers an easy way to contact you. GearSite can easily design and order beautiful business cards for you. Contact us to learn more.

Google Analytics

A good way to improve your marketing is understanding the results. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that offers you insights into who is visiting your website. You can use Google Analytics to understand the demographics of your users. Using that information, you can tailor your marketing to that demographic or get an idea of marketing areas that can be tapped into. As an essential part of  web marketing, don’t pass up on using Google Analytics to help increase your company’s marketing capabilities

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the world’s largest marketing automation platform, and for good reason. They offer an excellent free service that is a great place to start if you want to improve your email-based marketing. Although the free version has its limits, you can upgrade to a monthly subscription if you feel the need to increase email subscription-based marketing.