5 Budget Online Marketing Ideas for Your New Business

by smallbizbee · 7 comments

Below is a guest post from Michelle Strassburg, a small business owner who shares her ideas for budget online marketing.

Marketing your new business has its fare share of challenges. Your marketing is supposed to generate leads and sales on a competitive budget, but you're also expect to keep running the business on a day to day basis.

This means dealing with everything from cash flow issues to finding suppliers, therefore getting your marketing right is crucial.

Here are a selection of budget online marketing ideas for your new business which are easy to action and proven to deliver results. Let's get to it.

1. Register Your Business with Google Local

Google has been offering local businesses a chance to register their business address and phone number in its local listings for some time. When the search giant started to display local listing in its search results, the service become a must service for many businesses. When a user searches for a keyword together with a location, for example 'DC plumber', the search results will include listings from Google Local displayed on a map. The service is free to register.

2. Register Your Products or Services with Google Merchant

Another helpful and free service from the search giant, Google Merchant is a place for businesses to upload a data feed which includes products or services. Under some types of user searches, Google will include feeds from this service in its search results. Creating a data feed is easy and quick. You will need to build a simple product feed based on the type of products or services which the business is offering and upload them. It's that easy.

3. Promote Your Business Elsewhere

If you've reached the stage of been able to manage your own business, clearly you know a thing or two about your industry or occupation. To get your business out there in the public eye consider contributing your time and knowledge. Offer to write a guest post on quality sites and participate in the conversation across Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers and Linkedin Answers.

4. Consider Paid Search

Google AdWords is the largest sponsored search result program. While this marketing channel isn't free, it does fall under budget marketing ideas for new businesses simply because you are able to manage it yourself within a small budget. The idea behind any type of sponsored search result is simple. You bid on a keyword which best describes your product or service and pay a certain price for each click. While the price for each click depends on many variables the beauty of this channel is that you can set a daily budget to limit your investment. If you're new to AdWords and think your business might benefit from this channel, Google has a fantastic online how-to resource.

5. Build a Basic Reward Scheme

Offer an exclusive incentive to your regular customers which will help the business retain customers and win new ones. The incentive could take the form of a discount on future orders, discount on bulk purchase, upgraded delivery method, end of stock offers, priority customer support and much more. A reward scheme could also be based on customers referring new customers which has the added benefit of helping to grow your business.

What are your budget online marketing tips?

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Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Co-Founder at Wood and Beyond online sellers of wood flooring and worktops. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing and is an active blogger.