Some people wonder how some brands appear to be all over the place with orders, sales and reviews. “They must have a really huge budget,” some might think. However, it is not every brand that is aggressively marketing its products/services that has a large budget. In fact, there is quite a lot you can achieve on a zero budget, provided you have internet access.
Now, even if you have the funds to push a mega marketing campaign, you can still chip in some of these activities at zero cost. After all, who doesn’t like freebies?
Your marketing can be targeted at growing your visibility and brand awareness or increasing your sales. Either way, these tips would work fine for you. Here’s how you can draw up a marketing strategy with zero budget.
- Create a Tiktok Account
If you want to embark on a marketing campaign with no budget, you can start by creating a Tiktok Account. Tiktok is an app for making and sharing short videos on social media. It is now the fastest growing online social media platform and has since crossed a billion users. Keep in mind that your customers are among the millions of Tiktok users. The demographics show that users cut across different age groups and social classes. The visibility for individuals and businesses on Tiktok is huge; one video done right can exponentially increase your visibility, increase your followers and even generate sales.
Once on Tiktok, do not be in a rush to start creating content. First, check out what your competitors and other big players in your space are doing. You do not want to copy and paste what they are doing, but you can take a leaf from what they are doing and how they are doing it. Look out for the first video that made them go viral and see what they did with it. You can replicate something like it and add extra spice of creativity. Another thing that you can do is to talk about them and the business they do, what they do that you like and admire, why you respect them, etc. When they see it, they will likely repost it and just like that, your visibility would grow.
You can also search for trending topics in your niche, and look for a way to create videos explaining and giving value on those trending topics. You need to create something that truly offers value and not just do what everyone else is doing. Blow people’s minds with your creativity. Among the billion users out there, you cannot afford to not be extra creative. Set up your bio to contain a link to your WhatsApp inbox. There are websites you can use to create a form and a WhatsApp link without having to display your business phone number on your bio.
- Give out value for free to make sales
To get people to buy from you, you have to give out some value for free. When creating content on your Tiktok for instance, you can direct them to click the link in your bio to get a certain free training, discount, gift, etc. Clicking the link can take them to your WhatsApp inbox. From here, you can do either of two things.
If you are offering free training, you can create a WhatsApp group to aggregate leads for the free training. After teaching in the group and entertaining relevant questions, you have the opportunity to upsell other trainings to them. They could even make it easier for you when they ask questions because you can offer to provide answers and solutions in paid sessions.
The second thing you can do is to encourage them to save your WhatsApp number so that they can view your status updates and know how to access your promotions, discounts, gift cards and the likes.
Even if you do not make immediate sales, these people automatically become your community from where you can later get paying customers.
- Collaborate with other businesses, within and outside your niche
Find a way to locate the value in other people’s products and services, and work out a way to collaborate with them in a mutually beneficial manner. You could offer a free training to another business if you notice that they organize trainings for people you consider your ideal customers. During and after the training, upsell your products and solutions to the audience. If you sell beddings, you can collaborate with someone who is into interior decoration services. You can also collaborate with a mattress dealer. The possibilities are endless when you collaborate.
- Reach out to mini-influencers and offer them your product to try out and review
When marketing on a zero budget, you cannot afford to engage major influencers. However, you can reach out to several mini-influencers; people who are pulling significant engagements even though they might not have such huge followings. Get them to try your product for free and tell you what they think about it. If you are lucky, they will post the video testimonials and reviews on their handles, and you can have a lot of people checking you out from there. You can also get permission from them to use their video reviews and testimonials to run ads. The more of these reviews and testimonials you have out there, the more sales you will generate with time.
These steps are not difficult to try out. Online marketing with no budget will require time and a lot of effort, but spending zero bucks (except of course your data money) would make it worthwhile. Try out these tips over the next couple of months and let us know how things pan out.