Entrepreneurs always have their hands full, and the biggest challenge that they face is to wear different hats that often compel them to move in different directions and cause distraction. From starting up the business to helping it gather steam with proper marketing strategies, the tasks are quite daunting.  Among various challenges that entrepreneurs face, there is enough scope of making improvements in marketing, which is critical for gaining visibility and building brand awareness that is essential for survival and growth.  Despite numerous pressing priorities faced by business owners for operating the business, they must devote enough time and attention to marketing to generate revenue through sales and keep the business alive and kicking. According to Eric Dalius, small business owners must prioritize marketing to drive sales by overcoming their inhibitions about marketing being too expensive. 

The high popularity of online marketing campaigns, many of which are inundated with paid ads, often give a feeling that digital marketing is expensive. These are not the only ways to launch a marketing campaign. Many other low-cost marketing strategies are much useful and popular that is suitable for small businesses and has proven quite effective and launching budget-friendly marketing campaigns.  

In this article, we will focus on four low-cost marketing strategies that can help your business gain extensive exposure while generating organic traffic. Interestingly, these strategies have one thing in common – these give maximum emphasis to the people you are targeting and revolves around it.  

Networking – The EJ Dalius way 

Gaining visibility for the business is at the heart of all marketing strategies, and the easiest way to achieve it is to spread word of mouth through networking that almost everyone has access to. There are plenty of ways to do networking to make your business visible to a broad section of people.  The social media channels are excellent platforms for networking in varying degrees, but there is one platform, LinkedIn, dedicated to the cause of networking.  

Everyone you know and interact with in relation to your business, from customers to peers and more, includes everyone within your network. First, you build a personal brand by using LinkedIn and then use it to advance the brand-building exercise for your business.  To make things easier, you can a group page for your business or join an existing local business group and interact with the members and audience to enhance the exposure of your business. 

Have the right mindset for networking that revolves around people regardless of their businesses and positions. It should help to identify people who matter to youto make the business grow, and you must see what can do for them. It paves the way for marketing your business to a broader audience in a less obvious but more effective manner. 

Build a partnership 

A partnership is all about a reciprocal arrangement of business promotion by collaborating with other businesses that share similar interests and goals. For example, if you have a car dealership and know about another nearby business of car repairing, you can enter a mutual understanding of promoting each other’s business. As you can refer people to the car workshop, who look for such services and similarly, the workshop could direct people to you who are interested in buying cars. To lure referral customers, you and your partner could offer some discounts too.  

By building a partnership, you get access to a customer base of another business and vice versa. Partnerships foster a sense of support and unity within the community and work exceptionally well for local businesses. Business recommendations generate high trust among people and encourage them to follow recommendations made by businesses with which they have a positive experience. It costs nothing to build partnerships that help to build a reputation. 

Encourage reviews 

According to Eric J Dalius, no matter how well you project your business on the web, people pay more attention to online reviews about your business to understand the good and bad about it. Reviews about your products and services, as well as the overall experience of interactions of customers with your business, allow people to gain valuable insight on which they can base their decisions. The reviews being first-hand experiences of customers that are supposed to be unbiased and hence trustworthy tell about what others should rightfully expect from your business. Indeed, all reviews are not as objective and unbiased, but on going through a few, it is possible to draw near correct inferences that help to make well-informed decisions.  The impact of reviews is far-reaching because people who see the message often come forward to share it among many others. 

What others have experienced with your business bears clear indication about what people can expect from it.  Encouraging customers to share their positive reviews will help to accumulate endorsements for your business. Moreover, when someone writes a review, he or she will likely share the recommendation with many others among family and friends for their future needs.  It is a way of allowing customers to do the marketing for you without spending anything. 

Take to blogging 

Posing as a solution provider or problem solver to your customers is a marketing technique that might not look like marketing but can help to reap dividends. The technique consists of offering some help to people, even if they might not ask for it.  You may have many useful tips for your customers and audience that you would like to share with them, and the easiest way is to take to blogging. You need not spend any money to write blogs. But you must have the dedication and devote time to create blogs on topics that you know about so that you can market-friendly credibility that is beneficial for customers. 

By providing information to customers who find it useful, you build relationships that establish your business as a helpful authority. When people find the info useful, they would undoubtedly recall your business when they are out in the market to buy anything that matches with your product range.   

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