A guide to marketing on a shoestring

How small businesses can maximise impact with low-cost, high-focus marketing strategies

Small businesses often don’t have big budgets to spend on marketing, but promoting your products or services on a shoestring doesn’t mean doing less; it’s about being more intentional and targeted.  

While you might not be able to throw money at your marketing, you can be creative and engage your community. 

Small budgets can even put you at an advantage compared to bigger brands because being forced to be more focused allows you to build authentic human-to-human connections that larger firms often struggle to replicate. 

Here are some ideas for how to do marketing on a tight budget.  

Social media  

While driving sales organically on social media has gotten much harder than it used to be due to the platforms focusing on paid advertising, it is still possible. 

There’s no point in putting effort into posting on social media if your target audience doesn’t use it, so research the platforms your customers hang out on and dedicate your efforts there. 

Salesy posts do work but don’t be all about the promotion. People don’t want to be sold to all the time as that’s how they will remember your brand. Focus on other content that engages and adds value, such as humour or education.  

Small businesses also typically have the advantage of a founder closely involved in everything about the brand. So, behind the scenes content that tells your business story can be powerful, particularly in the early days of a start-up. Get someone on board early in your journey and they could become a customer for life.  

If you’re a B2B brand or you want to grow your personal brand, Professional LinkedIn offers paid-for features, such an InMail to use for sales, but there’s also lots you can do for free. Post consistently with interesting and informative content, engage and comment on other people’s posts and join relevant groups.  

If you can afford it, spending some money on social media advertising can be a powerful way to promote your brand because it allows you to be very targeted but make sure you have thought about who you are targeting and what you want them to think, feel and do before you start.   

SEO  

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of helping search engines to understand your website and encourage users to visit it. Paying an agency to do it for you can be expensive, but there are lots of things you can do yourself.  

Research the keywords you need to use to help users find your website. Free research tools include Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, UberSuggest, AnswerThePublic, and AlsoAsked. Increasingly, AI is also playing a bigger role in SEO strategies. 

Optimise your website with relevant keywords but don’t overdo it. Keep your language natural and avoid keyword stuffing. 

High quality content can drive traffic to your site so create useful and informative blog posts or other written content. If you’re struggling for ideas about what to write, think about questions related to your products or services that people might be looking for answers to. Provide the answers in well SEO’d content on your website.  

Include internal links in your posts that encourage people to move around your website.  

Mobiles account for around 62% of global website traffic, so make sure your website looks good and performs well on mobile devices.  

Your website needs to be fast so don’t use big image files for images and ensure it is user friendly. 

GEO 

On the other hand, generative engine optimisation (GEO) is becoming increasingly important for marketing. This isn’t the process of using AI to help with identifying keywords but optimising content to appear in search results generated by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.  

AI platforms will look for content that directly answers a user’s question. This means GEO is less about keywords and more about clear and well-structured content. When AI platforms crawl websites they are looking for chunks of information that can be used to train large language models (LLMs) and provide the most relevant answers to questions. 

There are more details about SEO v GEO here. 

Networking and collaboration  

Events and networking can be a good way to promote your brand if you’re targeted with who you want to engage. 

In the B2B world there are thousands of business events you can attend, but do your research before signing up to make sure the attendees will be useful to you. Start off by attending events as a participant, rather than going all in with an exhibition stand, Think about what you’re going to say to people you’ll meet and be sure to follow up after the event. When it comes to exhibiting, make sure your messages are focused on your prospects’ pain points and not your products and services. 

For consumer businesses, markets and pop-ups are good places where you can showcase your products. They are also a great way to gather market research from customers and highlight any improvements you need to make or new products you could introduce based on demand.  

You can also collaborate with social media influencers to create content about your products or services. This could be in exchange for a financial payment or product. While you’d probably love to work with influencers who have millions of followers, they can be extremely expensive. Micro influencers that are aligned with your values and operate in the same sphere with a few thousand followers can be just as useful.   

Another collaboration opportunity is with businesses that complement what you offer. It could be as simple as just promoting each other via newsletters and on social media, or something more formal like a joint venture.  

Quality over quantity 

Most high-tag, paid-for marketing services operate on spray and pray, meaning they reach an extremely wide audience but the quality of that audience is sometimes questionable. Many of the people you’re reaching with these expensive services will be irrelevant, some may even be bots. The real high-value engagements come from high-precision campaigns. 

If you can identify your target audience and effectively reach them with an engaging message, your cost per acquisition will go way down. This takes time and innovation, not exorbitant spending. 

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