We all know time is money.
So, when you have Low or No Budget, why not replace with Time?
There are many marketing ideas out there that don’t eat up your cash, but you’ll need to put in your time in return. In my article below, time spent will be indicated in form of stars, maximum 5 for most time-consuming, and 1 for the least time consumed.
Tap On Existing Resources
Tap on your existing website. There may be a fixed yearly maintenance cost or even a underutilized Content Management System where you can update your site easily. You can choose to add social media buttons where your customers can share your site conveniently or add an online live chat widget to make you site more interactive with better customer service.
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Tap on your existing suppliers’ promotion. They may offer promotions like points programs, where you can exchange items with loyalty rewards points. Sometimes the reward items can be something of value where you can use it for your own promotion prize in contests, lucky draws, etc.
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Tap on your existing suppliers’ marketing materials. One of them can be regular newsletters. You can suggest placing your article if it fits their industry. If it’s an e-newsletter, you can also offer to send out to your mailing list if they agree to you place your article for free.
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Write
Write a blog. Blogging is one of the effective ways to create backlinks to your website and lead to better ranking in search engines. Write something and try to link your site. Not everyone is good in writing for their own industry. If your content is not compatible, just place the link by the side.
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Write an eBook, and give it for free. We like free stuff. You may promote your eBook on your blog, website, social network pages, etc. Get those who are interested to drop you an email with their contact details. Content can be anything useful, but will be better if it’s close to your product or service. The closer the content of your eBook, the database collected consist of more quality leads.
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Write e-newsletter. For B2B, target the departments who may engage your service, write articles that may interest them. For B2C, write e-newsletter targeting consumer info within the industry of your business. I.e.: beauty updates, if you are in the beauty industry.
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Reconstruct your online signature with a short call to action and create a link to your website to increase exposure. At times, when the recipient wants to check out more info of your company, they just have to click the link and will be directed to your site immediately without hassle. For others who have social network accounts, you may also add links to your pages. However, try not to add too many links as it may clutter, causing confusion to the recipient.
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Write articles and submit to online article directories. Like eHow, is a platform where you can submit your articles and get a backlink to your website, you never know you may even be able to divert some of the traffic from their established site.
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Email marketing, we are now talking about using it as a free tool. You can email self-designed electronic direct mailers with Dreamweaver, e-newsletters with monthly updates, carefully crafted business introduction letters, and many more. Prerequisites will be definitely a quality mailing list. If you are not sure if your list is good enough, send to all contacts that you think may be interested in your service or product. Please do not spam unless you want to irritate your potential customers to ignore every single one mail you sent.
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Comment
Commenting in Forums will gain you some online exposure. It’s a great way to enter into the community. For example, a car forum will attract people who are interested in cars. This means if you chose the correct forum, you should be able to find your desired target audience, and create some awareness among them.
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Commenting on Social media enhances interaction and engagement with people. It is a mass targeting platform, with the strength to create more awareness to the public. Nevertheless, you must be very careful of what you comment, as the pull and push factors are equal.
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Commenting on Blogs can be a way of niche marketing. You can search for blogs with articles that are within your industry. A brief comment with a link may help you attract some new visitors to your site.
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Applicable to media you are commenting, do not flood or hard sell. You may gain a bad reputation or even banned from the particular media platform.
Ask
Ask for Referrals. You may start by telling people you met that you are in a certain business. The person you met may not need your service or product, but they may know someone who does. So why not ask them to refer your business to someone who may need?
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Ask for Testimonials from your customers. Testimonials increase your credibility, but if you don’t ask, they may not give. Besides marketing with positive testimonials, you have a chance to make improvements with the negative voices.
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Ask for trade incentive from your supplier. Some companies set aside an incentive to retain customers who give them huge profits. No matter if you are the one who gives them a lot of business, just ask. It may be sponsorships in cash or marketing materials, if you don’t ask, you’ll never get.
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Give
Give Referrals, and you may get some in return. It’s all about building a good relationship with your business contacts. Chances are they will remember you when they come across someone who may need your service or product, and refer you to the person.
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Give Testimonials. Most of the time, we give testimonials because we think they deserve one, either complimentary or feedback on improvement. But how can it help in your marketing? Try to weave a little info of your business into the testimonial, and it turns into another marketing platform.
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Give advice using expertise and experience. You are the expert in your field with knowledge, experience and skills. Show it, you will know trust and credibility is gained when you start seeing people coming to you for advice.
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Join
Join the top Social Networks to connect, build relationships and identity. Some of them allow you to create a business page for free, where you can promote your brand and rank better in search engines.
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Join Business listing and directories locally or industry wide. Quite a handful of them are free. Most of them have existed in the internet much longer than you are. So why not join them to generate some traffic to your site? At the same time improve your search ranking while they provide a trusted link to your site.
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Video
Video Tutorials. It can be step by step guides or product demonstrations. Take your own video, there are many devices out there in the market, or maybe already in your room, that can take decent videos. Simply edit and upload to YouTube.
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Video Testimonials can be tougher, as you need to coordinate with your satisfied customers. Tell them the truth, this is going to be a free production, don’t expect high quality videos, and will be uploaded to YouTube. Video testimonials can also be uploaded to your website if it supports this function. It serves the same objective as written testimonials, just that some people prefer to see and hear than to read.
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Webinars, in short for web seminars. It’s live seminar in front of a webcam, one of the ways to educate and share. Audiences can attend anywhere with a computer, webcam and internet connection. There are providers in the internet where you can host a webinar for free, but with some restrictions like advertisements, maximum attendees, if you don’t mind.
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Call
Cold call. A traditional way of marketing. There must a reason why banks are still doing it these days. Look at the objective and then the script. Focus on getting interest rather than jumping into selling.
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Call old leads. Say hi, make them remember you. They may not need your product or service in the past, doesn’t mean they will not need them now. Or maybe, they could refer you to someone else?
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Call regular customers, befriend them and build a strong relationship so that they will keep you in mind whenever they need your service or product. They are also the ones who may write testimonials or give referrals if they are happy customers.
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Affiliate
Add links of business affiliates into your website and vice versa. This is a way where all of you may exchange traffic to your sites, as long as there are no conflicts of interest.
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Exchange referrals with your business affiliates. These referrals may be more genuine, since there’s a close business relationship between all of you.
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Briefly cross-sell the products or services of your business affiliates, and ask them to do the same. Understand what you customer is looking for before you suggest. For example, your customer comes to you for design solution to a marketing campaign. Your business is not a one-stop shop, but your customer may require other services where you don’t provide, like copywriting, web hosting, etc. in this case, you may cross-sell the relevant services within your business affiliates to them. This way, you should be able to gain more business in this win-win-win situation.
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Exchange name card is very simple. Just leave a stack of your name cards with each business affiliate, they can choose to leave it on the front desk for easy pick up, or keep a few in their wallets to hand out when there’s a potential lead for any business within the affiliate group.
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