As of 2017, there were 22 million small businesses in the United States. And like you, most small businesses don’t want to spend a fortune on advertising.

Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, cheap marketing strategies abound to allow you to show off your goods or services without breaking the bank.

While it might seem like it’s incredibly expensive to get anyone to notice you, there are several things you can do to get noticed while you’re still working on your cash turnover.

Read on for some of the best cheap marketing strategies you can employ, whether online or off.

1. Increase Footfall with a Cute Window Display

If your store is a brick and mortar store, you can instantly increase footfall with a cute window display. Make your windows look inviting by keeping it simple and focusing on just one or two items.

Make the personality of your store shine through, and don’t underestimate the importance of lighting. With a cute display in your window, pedestrians won’t be able to just walk past without taking a quick look inside.

The people popping in for a quick look are already attracted to your wares, thanks to the cute display window, and therefore, they might be ready to buy something.

It doesn’t take hiring an interior designer and a ton of money to create a cute display window. You can do it yourself after reading some top tips. Then, watch traffic soar.

2. Work with Microinfluencers

You’ve likely already heard of influencers before, but you might have no idea about microinfluencers.

Influencers are social media personalities who create content for their fans. Often times, this content centers around something like food, clothing, make-up or homeware. With beautiful photos, vlogs and blogs, they captivate their audience and give them ideas of things to buy.

Influencers can have a huge say in what their audience buys, and they can suggest a product or service that their audience might have never thought they would need.

Working with huge influencers can be expensive. So, you’ll likely want to cross off the Kardashian-Jenner clan when deciding whom to target. But, working with smaller influencers, or microinfluencers, is a great and inexpensive way to get noticed.

Microinfluencers are those with a smaller following, and therefore less expensive to work with. Not only that, their audience is in tune with the blogger or vlogger and is actually interested in what they have to say.

These influencers have really high interaction rates, so you’ll know your product is getting seen. Provide a discount code or free gift for their followers and voila!

3. Advertise on Instagram

Many individuals are bemoaning the fact that advertising on Instagram is now a norm for ensuring your posts get seen. And while it is annoying for those who are used to organic traffic, it is still a great way to reach people.

Create a gorgeous Instagram post or ad detailing some of your best products. You’ll want to be sure the photography or video you show is eye-catching and attention-grabbing, as those scrolling through their feed may not stop unless you provide them with something worthwhile.

You can then use Instagram’s PPC or pay-per-click option. If you’re a small business, you can put in a relatively small budget and still reach a lot of potential customers. For around $30 over five days, you could potentially reach about 10,000 people.

You can either specify the type of person you’d like to advertise to or if you’re already an active user on the app, they can target the individuals like those who have interacted with your account in the past.

While you’re unlikely to make 10,000 sales from the post, you’ll still get eyes on your content, which is what you really want.

4. Create Shareable Content

Creating shareable content is a free way to get “butts in the seats.” Shareable content includes things like viral videos, listicles, and quotes.

Of course, you can’t predict when something is going to go viral, so it is a bit optimistic to say you’ll be creating a viral post. But, creating something many people are apt to share is relatively easy.

The cheapest (read free) way to do so is to create a shareable quote. You can do this on a site like Canva or Picmonkey, and specify it for whatever medium (Facebook or Instagram) you’d like to share it on.

Make sure that you mark your company’s name somewhere on the photo so it doesn’t just become a nice quote that’s lost in the ether.

Then, simply post it. You can also do a PPC for something like this to get more people to share it. That will give people the incentive to see who created the quote and come back to your business to see what you’re all about.

The Best Cheap Marketing Strategies

The best cheap marketing strategies mostly include being Internet savvy, but also include figuring out your target customer. Without knowing who exactly you want to reach, you won’t be able to create a meaningful marketing strategy.

In today’s world, you can’t simply cast the net wide and hope something sticks. Instead, you need to know exactly who you’re targeting so that you can be sure and retain customers that will want to purchase from you again and again.

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