If your marketing is stuck because you can’t decide where to spend your almost non-existent marketing budget, we have some ideas for you.
First of all know this: you’re in good company. Many, if not most small businesses have limited marketing budgets, and deciding how to make the most of those meagre budgets is a stressful exercise in guesswork.
Allow us to reduce the stress. For starters, throw out any thoughts of fancy marketing funnels, complicated strategies or time-intensive and expensive campaigns. They’re not what you need right now, and we’re willing to bet that you would be extremely reluctant to implement them anyway. And rightly so.
Instead, we’ll walk through some examples of simple but impactful marketing tactics you can pull off on a shoestring budget—even if you’re short on cash, time, or marketing experience.
When you don’t have money to throw at ads or joint ventures, it forces you to focus on what really matters: building trust, delivering value, and connecting with your community.
Big brands often struggle to come across as authentic, but small businesses live authenticity every day.
Your stories, your journey, your direct engagement—those are superpowers in a noisy digital world. You get to cut through the nonsense and fakery – and that gives you a real advantage.
Let’s imagine that you’re a small, local bakery. You don’t have money for advertising, but you do have a social media expert in-house – who also happens to be your teenage son or daughter.
Cheap and cheerful marketing at its best.
Pay your kids or a marketing student a few dollars to shoot some behind-the-scenes videos on their smartphone. Ask them to edit those videos into short segments for Instagram, Facebook or another social media platform of your choice.
You’re looking for processes. How does a bag of flour and some cocoa turn into the most delicious pastries? Your bakers can explain how it’s done and show your audience how to do it. Look for interesting insights and surprising stories and feature them on your feed. Push those videos out into the world and you’ll find that people are following you to find out what’s hot and fresh in your bakery, and worth driving over for.
Authenticity sells.
The Tradeoffs
Building up a following is definitely slower without a marketing budget. You won’t get instant spikes in traffic. You might feel like you’re shouting into the void at first. It requires consistency, and it won’t always be comfortable. But if you stick with it, the foundation you build will be far stronger and more loyal than anything an ad can buy.
So bear in mind that marketing on a shoestring budget does require a tradeoff – time instead of money. So you’ll need to budget your time for this, and to spend that time wisely.
To begin with, let’s take a look at some important principles to bear in mind when you’re working with minimal marketing budgets.
Marketing Budget Tips
Set a monthly marketing budget. This is important because it focuses you on making marketing decisions – albeit small ones. Ideally, you want to set a budget for the next three months and then reassess as you begin to see the results of your marketing efforts.
How much should your marketing budget be? Well, there’s no easy answer to that. Some would say it’s a certain percentage of your revenue (perhaps 10% – 20%). Others, myself included, would tell you to spend whatever makes sense to you.
That could be nothing, or $100, or $5,000. And yes, some would consider $5,000 a shoestring budget.
It doesn’t really matter for now. What matters is that you begin to focus on marketing your business in a consistent, coherent way with the budget at your disposal.
Track your expenses and Return on Investment (ROI). Keep a close eye on how much you’re spending, what you’re spending it on, and what the results are.
You won’t always be able to tie your results directly to your marketing efforts but you can track enough to give you a good idea about whether you’re at least gaining traction.
If your marketing focuses on getting the word out about what you do, you’ll likely focus on the number of leads, engagement on social media, and similar metrics. While they may be more difficult to tie in directly to revenue figures, they are still important indicators for you to follow.
Create a Marketing Schedule. Everyone ought to be scheduling marketing hours as part of a weekly schedule, but it’s especially important for reluctant marketers.
If you don’t schedule time for marketing in your calendar, (written in ink, not pencil), you just won’t do it.
So decide how many hours each week you can devote to marketing and then treat those scheduled hours as you would any other firm commitment.
Schedule at least 5 hours per week. You can devote one hour each day if that seems easier at the beginning, but you’re going to need bigger blocks of time once you begin to work on content creation and other focused tasks.
Use free or cheap tools. It’s easy to get pulled into the “must-have” software market. There is almost nothing you “must-have” in the way of specific tools.
Broadly speaking, you’re going to need an email responder, a website, a social media account or two, and a way to create images and other graphics. You can get everything for free and upgrade as your marketing takes shape and your need for more sophisticated tools grows.
But for now, look for free or inexpensive options. Don’t use a shoestring marketing budget as an excuse to ignore your marketing because you don’t have the “right” tools.
Take a step back. Before you begin, take a long, cold, hard look at what you’ve been doing to market your business until now. Try to figure out what worked and what worked less well. To help you with this process, here are 10 questions to ask about your marketing efforts until now:
- What marketing activities did we try in the past (social media, email, flyers, events, etc.)?
- Which marketing efforts seemed to get people most excited, interested, or talking about our business?
- Did we notice a spike in sales, website visits, calls, or inquiries after certain campaigns or promotions?
- Which products or services sold best during our last marketing efforts?
- Did customers mention seeing our ads or hearing about us somewhere specific?
- What marketing activity felt like it was the most work, and did it lead to any clear results?
- Were there any marketing tactics we really enjoyed (or disliked) doing? Why?
- Did we stick to our planned marketing budget, or did we go over or under?
- Did we get any feedback from customers—positive or negative—about our marketing?
- If we could do one marketing thing differently next time, what would it be?
Here are a couple of ideas for marketing quick wins on a shoestring budget which don’t require much in the way of time or money:
Ask Me Anything
Offer online office hours where you open up a Zoom call to anyone who wants to ask you a business-related question. Record the meeting and repurpose video clips of great questions and answers in your social media, and on your website.
This can be a monthly or more frequent event. Create a transcript from the video and use it as a base for a blog post or quote snippets. You’ll need to get permission from your audience to record them for this purpose.
You don’t need to hire a professional editor to help you with this. High-schoolers looking for experience are often delighted to help with this kind of work for a minimal fee.
LinkedIn Profile
Update your LinkedIn profile and make sure that it reflects both you as a person, and the business you run. One of the first places potential clients, customers, and even suppliers go to check you out is LinkedIn, and a less-than-stellar profile may cost you dearly.
Invest some time in asking for testimonials to show on your profile. Now, if you truly are a reluctant marketer, this may be a big ask for you. But it’s a necessary one. To get started, you may find it easier to adapt this template to your needs:
Hi [Name],
I’m reaching out to ask if you’d be willing to write a LinkedIn recommendation for me. I’ve really enjoyed working with you on [project/role/specific collaboration], and I think your perspective would add a lot of value to my profile.
If you’re open to it, I’d really appreciate it if you could touch on [specific skills, projects, or qualities you’d like highlighted]. Of course, feel free to write whatever you’re comfortable with.
Thank you so much for considering this—please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you as well!
Best,
[Your Name]
Go Get Started
There are hundreds of ways you can market your business without spending a fortune. For more ideas, download our mind map: Marketing on a Shoestring for Reluctant Marketers. It will help you brainstorm ideas.
As always, we’re here if you have any questions or want to dig deeper.