How to generate leads for your business with limited budget
For all businesses, big or small, regardless of the size of budgets, generating leads is certainly very important as it may be the life force of your business. It is with no doubts one of the things you need to put in place to survive and stand out from the competition in the market.
For small businesses with low budgets, getting the most out of every penny you spend is crucial. However, obtaining leads for your business is something essential that you must take very seriously. More leads mean more customers and more customers will lead to more profit.
Here are some tips on how to generate leads for your business with limited budget.
Choose your audience
Being an owner of a small business with a small budget, you do not have the resources to reach a huge audience. Getting across to the right ones is very important, and you should focus on this audience. Choose your target audience carefully so that you'll be able to choose the best and most effective strategy that suits both parties. This will surely help to generate leads within the targeted audience.
Networking and thought-leadership
Through thought-leadership and networking, most businesses can boost their online and offline reputations. Leading or taking part in conversations through speaking at conferences or events, conducting webinars or publishing written works is a way of standing out, attracting attention and gaining more publicity in a competitive market environment. With this, generating leads is made easier as you must have gained the attention of a broad audience.
However, the returns on this lead generating strategy might not be measurable at the beginning, but it gets easier to measure with time if carried out efficiently. The only resource you need to spend to speak at an event is your time. This means that you are required to spend little or no money on this method, and you can generate leads easily from here.
Use PPC Ad Campaign
Generally, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) might not be the best strategy when it comes to marketing, but it's certainly one of the marketing solutions you should consider as a business owner, especially when your budget is limited. PPC is an effective and budget friendly way to generate leads for your business, and it also offers you full control over what you spend.
Taking time to select keyword phrases that suit your marketing best carefully is an effective way of making PPC more productive for your small-budget business. Although, the phrases you choose might not generate a huge amount of leads. However, the leads generated with these phrases have higher conversion rate and for a lesser cost.
Facebook is one of the best PPC sites around that you can use to generate more selected or targeted leads. They offer you the chance to target your leads through demographics like age, gender, interests among others. This allows you to get your messages across to a selected group of leads instead of random people with different interests.
Take advantage of social media
Social media is undoubtedly one of the best ways to generate more leads easily especially when you have a limited budget. With the improvement in technology nowadays, the social media is a powerful tool that provides you with an endless pool of websites that allows you to build and nurture your leads easily. Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and much more allows you to generate leads for your business free-of-charge, through posting updates and info about your business, sharing posts or several other ways. This method is budget friendly, and with the right experience or training, you can generate leads quickly and freely without breaking a sweat.
Free public relations
Getting the proper publicity for your business is certainly an important factor to consider to be successful. Many businesses– especially big business pay an enormous amount of money monthly to public-relations firms for publicity. Also, the returns from using this method might not be measurable, and it can be very annoying and expensive. This is something you must try to avoid especially if your budget and resources are limited.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO), is a site that you can use to get the publicity you need with absolutely no cost.
Stand out with quality
With no doubts, the market is overcrowded with several other businesses that offer the same products and services as your business. A way to survive and stand out from all the competition is to provide quality at all times. The best way to generate and build more leads is offer quality to your target audience at all times. Evidently, buyers are more interested in results than just buying products. Therefore, providing them the quality they need to achieve the best result is a guaranteed way of getting more leads, keeping your existing customers satisfied and standing out from all the competition.
Use what you have
Generating more leads for your business can sometimes be stressful and expensive. Using your existing customers – whom you have made happy with your products or services, is a way to generate more leads with no stress or cost. Let your happy customers do some of the advertising for you. This might be through product reviews or comments on how your products have helped them achieve their desired results. This will certainly make it easier for you to generate more leads free-of-charge and will also provide you with the chance to satisfy new customers and make them happy.
Conclusion
Lead nurturing can sometimes prove to be a difficult or expensive to thing to do, especially if you own a small business and you have a limited budget. There are several means of generating more leads easily for your business with little or no cost. To choose the best lead generating strategy for your business, you have to understand the needs your customers and put the size of your budget into consideration. You should take extra care to ensure that the marketing strategy you choose suits your business and customers, and also that it's still within your budget.
Thirumalesh Prasad C G (Thiru) is an entrepreneur, Founder, and CEO of Inboundsys. He has over 22 years of experience working for various multinational IT products and services companies in India and abroad. He was a significant member and worked as a user interface architect, designing the user interface for many web applications and products. In addition to running Inboundsys, he is an advisory board member in various other design studios and digital marketing agencies. He is a passionate blogger who loves writing on digital marketing, inbound marketing, lifestyle, philosophy, positive thinking, and motivation.