5 inexpensive brand promotional strategies for small businesses

Brand promotion is an effective way to communicate with your target audience and existing customers. Big companies boost their reach and ROI by spending millions on their branding, and as a small business owner or start-up, you shouldn't ignore it because of budget limitations. Luckily the new era of technology has dug up many modern yet inexpensive ways that small businesses can implement to run a high-end promotional campaign for their brands. 

The listed promotional strategies don't cost much! You can get the best out of them in terms of brand visibility, new customers, and increment in sales. 

Social media marketing

We cannot ignore this era's most popular medium social media platforms when talking about inexpensive brand promotion methods. They are perfect for building a brand community for your business. Brand promotion activities on social media require lower investment but clever marketing tactics. You can run marketing campaigns and giveaways on social networks, provide coupon codes to your followers, and produce engaging content related to your products, brand, or current market trends. 

The main goal of successful and productive social media marketing is to capture a more engaged and broader audience, which results in enhanced web traffic, conversions, and brand reach.

Smart Tip: Find your target audience and which social network they use most, begin targeting it, and then move to other social platforms one by one. 

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Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing is a great strategy in the current era of social media. Small businesses usually use this way as a cherry on top of their existing marketing strategy but as per modern marketing gurus, this is a highly beneficial marketing tool and therefore should be a part of your overall planning process and not just a top-up. Consumers take constant information from electronic and print media but now social media has become a dominant part of the mix. When you integrate social media influencers into your marketing plan then you cover all the bases to outreach your brand visibility at every customers' touchpoint. According to a survey by Tribers, a social media marketing group by Jules Lund, an Aussie radio and TV host, 82% of customers acknowledge that they value the recommendation from influencers whom they follow. This is perhaps because the lifestyle of a micro-influencer is more accessible for people and their talks hit closer to home. The phenomenon makes an influencer more relatable as compared to celebrities who are more expensive to use for marketing purposes. Influencer marketing is cost-effective as it generates assessable ROI without breaking the bank. It is a self-serving add-on in which you can invest as much or less according to your situation.

Promotional Products

In the age of e-commerce, SMEs can find a plethora of online B2B platforms that sell promotional products at very reasonable rates. Although it needs a meagre amount of investment, it can actually increase your brand's visibility in the market. It is crucial to make a suitable selection of the product according to budget, business type and the target market. In the current competitive market, these B2B platforms are offering bulk products on various discount deals which makes this method a very affordable way of promoting an SME brand. By investing a little more, a small business can easily have these products customized with the company's logo or tagline. Your logo is very conveying of your brand message but this effective logo will be useless if it's not seen by prospective and existing customers.  A logo, when visible to the prospective customer, can create brand awareness, while the same can evoke brand loyalty in the existing customers of your product. In order to increase such visibility, you can have your logo and tagline printed on a suitable item and can give them away on your promotional campaigns and field activities such as in a game night, a rally, or in a promotional booth in a mall.

Email marketing

In the age of growing social media trends, E-mail marketing does not sound much tempting. However, surveys and reports provide statistics to prove that this marketing strategy still holds significance in terms of being budget-friendly and effective.

Litmus, an expert company in email marketing estimates that email marketing makes an average return of $42 on every $1 that you spend on this strategy. Another B2C survey revealed that 59% of survey participants' purchase decisions are influenced by emails they receive from businesses. Another study was conducted in 2019 to evaluate the conversion rate of email marketing. The investigation of 1 billion shopping sessions reflected that email marketing resulted in a conversion rate of 2.3% as compared to 1% of social media. 

In an ideal situation, email and social media marketing can be integrated by adding "share" and "Like" tabs to your emails which will add a way for customers to get connected with your brand. You can adorn your emails with customer reviews from social media sites while you can link your newsletter email to social media posts which will come out as a perfect blend of both marketing strategies. 

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Reward and loyalty programs

Customer rewards are deemed trivial by many marketing practitioners. Yet businesses are using this strategy for ages, and each day more companies are realizing the positive effect of reward programs and incorporating the strategy in their overall marketing plan. Rewards and loyalty programs indeed build customers' loyalty, and no one can deny the value that loyalty brings to the table. Earl Sasser, Jr and Frederick F. Reichheld documented in Harvard Business review that the most loyal customers of a business are most profitable as well. The reward programs are economical in an indirect but very effective way. When rewards programs are extended to existing customers, their loyalty to brands increases, and with every additional year of relationships, it becomes less costly to serve those customers. Even after the loyalty cycle is expired, the loyal customers become business builders by bringing in a new array of customers through referrals. The trust that you evoke in customers through reward and loyalty programs pays off as 9 out of 10 consumers do not buy a brand if they do not trust it. This can cost your business more as compared to what you invest in your loyalty and reward programs.