It can be tricky to boost your business’ sales when you’re working on a tight budget.
By Lanre Onibalusi
Running a business comes with various challenges. Risk and uncertainty are the primarily inherent elements that your company needs to face along the way. There will be months when you’re experiencing an increase in sales, but there will also be months that you’re barely making enough profit to cover your expenses.
There are many ways to increase your sales and grow your company. But it can be tricky to boost your business’ sales when you’re working on a tight budget. You’ll have a hard time keeping your finances and marketing under control. To help you solve this problem, here are a few good ways to increase your sales on a tight budget.
Use Social Media to Your Budget Advantage
Social media can play an essential role in your business. Using it can help promote and sell your products and services to your customers. The use of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to your advantage is also one of the best ways to raise your customer awareness as well as get a higher percentage of increase in sales.
Advertising on social media platforms is an inexpensive and effective way to increase your sales when your business is running on a tight budget. You may also post customer testimonials to your social media feeds which can also help spark interest in your products and services.
Additionally, you can use your social media channels as an open line of communication. Use them to disseminate interesting information about your business by posting or tweeting articles or blog posts of particular significance. You can also use them to illustrate how your company works through visual implementations.
Communicate With Your Current Customers
Your current customers are your best assets in your attempt at increasing your business’ revenue. They are a necessary resource in helping your business grow and succeed. With that in mind, good communication with your current customers or clients is key to your company’s growth and increased profits over the years.
Building a good relationship with your customers involve developing a certain level of trust. It becomes easier to up-sell your clients if they’re already familiar or, better yet, trust the quality of your company’s products or services. Thus, it goes without saying that your best bet at a successful business venture is to develop a consistent customer oriented culture.
This doesn’t just involve listening to and communicating well with them, it also involves quickly analyzing how you can help them address each of the challenges they may face as well as proffering reasonable solutions. It is also a great way to receive valuable feedback which may give you unique insights on what changes you can make to help improve their overall experience.
Creatively Utilize the Cheaper Ways of Promotion
There are a lot of cheap avenues for product promotion and if you’re creative enough with them, they can be very as effective. One such way is the use of vehicles as mobile billboards. You may also distribute your company’s custom-designed business cards at various venues of strategic value. Creation of promotional flyers is another cost-effective way to promote your products or services.
Ultimately, guerilla marketing is a hugely important and cost efficient method of promotion. It emphasizes creativity over budget and offers strategies that are ultimately cheap to implement. It’s a genuinely effective way of grasping the public eye which invariably helps improve your sales.
Bundle Your Products and Services
Selling bundled products or services as a package instead of individual offerings is an excellent way to increase your business’ sales, even if you’re on a low budget. Doing so can help your customers save valuable time and money which in turn allows you to sell even more products and services.
However, you also need to make sure that your bundles are flexible. Your potential customers may reject your package if they feel that not enough of the bundle resonates with them. Being flexible also means that you can swap out different products or services for multiple needs while helping increase your sales.
Run a Referral System
As already referenced above, your current customers are your greatest assets and one of the ways in which you can utilize this asset is by running a referral system which basically ensures your customer pool increases. To run an effective referral system, you need to offer the right kind of incentives. This could be anything from discount coupons to free products.
Takeaway
Creating the right marketing strategies become paramount when your marketing budget isn’t as big as Coca Cola’s. While there is no secret formula to marketing success –since every business venture is unique in its own way–one fail-safe technique involves looking inwards. With a customer-oriented approach to marketing, you don’t have to break the bank and will hardly go astray.
You can utilize any of these low-cost marketing ideas to generate more revenue while improving your relationship with your customers.
Lanre Onibalusi is a Digital Marketing Expert/Consultant with almost a decade worth of experience. He majored in Economics during his time at the University of Ibadan and is currently a self-employed entrepreneur. A huge part of his expertise involves research, writing, and public speaking. Some of his writings have been published on LifeHack, Entrepreneur Mag, and The HuffingtonPost among many others. You can follow him on twitter, or email him: oni@lanroni.com. Be sure to check out his website too.
Budget stock photo By Elnur/Shutterstock
