11 Ways to Increase Revenue with Limited Marketing Budget

With more brands marketing online each day, the competition for online advertising is increasing. The low barrier to entry and quick implementations enable brands to launch campaigns within minutes. This creates a huge competition for target keywords and audience, making it difficult to gain traction. You might be a small growing business with a very limited marketing budget. Is there a way to grow your revenue without investing a lot on online advertising? Absolutely.

1. Content marketing

Consistently writing relevant content that helps your target audience is a great way to build a relationship with them over time. Over time, you become an authority in the field or topic. Write valuable content on your blog, Medium, LinkedIn to increase your credibility and educate your readers. You could leverage free design tools like Canva to create visually appealing content and infographics.

You could also do guest posts on other blogs that you can add value to and appeal to a new set of audience. With this, you increase your reach while building relationships with other people in your industry.

2. Business-to-Business sales (B2B)

Limiting yourself to end-consumers as your customers limit your sales as well. Evaluate if and how you can position your product or service to other businesses. There may be opportunities for mutual collaboration, increasing your revenue. The deals may take longer but provide a stable, strategic position.

3. Co-marketing partnership

Look for opportunities to partner with businesses that can market your product to their audience. If your product brings value to its customers, benefitting their overall business, it will be open to it.

For example, if your service offers music, you could partner with businesses that would benefit by giving its customers a better experience by adding your service in the mix. These could be restaurants, arcades, transport providers, etc.

4. Email marketing

Having an email list helps you sell more by engaging the people who have already shown interest in you by signing up. You can use free tools like MailChimp if you don’t have any budget. These tools enable you to build lists, gain new subscribers and set up automatic emails to keep them engaged.

If you have any traffic coming to your website, you need to have email marketing. When your visitor shows interest in you, you can re-target them and follow up to see if a conversion is possible.

5. Customer service and reviews

Pay attention to what customers say after using your product or service. Your effort in providing the best service for your customers and collecting testimonials and reviews will help increase your sales.

It is more cost effective to sell to an existing customer than acquire a new one. So it is important to keep them happy. Bad reviews from unhappy customers deter people from investing in your products thereby negatively impacting your sales.

6. Beta programs

Offering a free beta program before launching the final product can boost sales. Create a good first impression. Beta users can then go on to invest in the product. Or they may be proud first adopters who then do word-of-mouth marketing to help get you more leads. You will also be able to find any glitches that need to be fixed in the final product. Listening to these beta users to produce a better end product is a win-win.

7. Influencer marketing

It will take time to gain the trust of an audience and build a following. You might not be there yet, but there are other people who are. Leverage their influence to drive more traffic and revenue to your website. There will be costs involved, but it may work out better for you when compared to investing in ads. The number of followers should not be your only criteria. Look at engagement and the type of audience they have.

8. Free Publicity

You can contact local journalists; PR companies and websites that offer free press releases to publish a story about your business or about a new product. You can pitch to a news source and get coverage without having to spend money. This approach does not eat up a lot of your time and will give you free publicity.

9. Encourage referrals

You need to build a strong relationship with your customers who believe in your product or service and your mission. They will then become active promoters. To know more about them and get them to participate, you can give out discounts and create loyalty programs or hold contests and giveaways that gives cool prizes to post submissions getting the most likes.

10. Social media

If you don’t have the budget for full-fledged social media marketing, you can still use the free tools and platforms to organically grow with limited investment. Schedule compelling posts on your social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn without having to pay anything. Tag relevant industry leaders and potential partners on relevant posts. Use hashtags to improve your reach. Engage the audience and get to know more about them. You will then be in a better position to create relevant content.

11. Affiliate marketing

You can give a part of your sales to anyone willing to sell and promote your products for you. This gives them the incentive to sell while both of you can reap the benefits. Your affiliates may have access to a different audience that you can leverage to increase your reach. New customers obtained through affiliates can then potentially become repeat customers for other products that you may launch.

Building diverse streams of revenue generation add more stability. You don’t have to spend a lot of ad campaigns and tools. Lead nurturing and lead scoring processes can help build strong relationships with your consumers over a period of time, making the growth more stable and sustainable.