As a small business, marketing and communications is important. With it you can get your name out there and target the right audience. However, as a small business sometimes marketing and other communication tools are out of your budget but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Many people will tell you that you need hundred or thousands each month to spend on digital, PR or marketing agencies to help, but there are tools out there that cost less than £100.

Check our simple, cost-effective marketing tips.

Check the speed of your website

We have briefly talked about website speed in our previous blog about SEO and we want to reiterate this.

Website speeds are important when it comes to how a website ranks in a particular search engine, and can also affect how long a visitor stays on your website. If a page doesn’t load within 5 second you can be sure the visitor has clicked off. Research even shows that reducing website speed can increase saled by over 50%.

Test My Site is a great Google tool where you can check your website speed on both desktop and mobile. It will give handy suggestions on how to fix the issue and help get your website running faster.

Use strong Call to Actions throughout

A good call to action, or CTA, can help draw a visitor's attention. Whether on your website, or when posting on social media, you should always use good CTAs to help draw customers to your website and to make a purchase.

Fix 404 Pages

A slow website is bad, but a link that leads to nowhere is even worse. A 404 page is basically when a page cannot be found, either from a broken link or a mistyped URL, and as you can imagine if you are a new visitor to the website, landing on this page is pretty much an immediate bounce.

To fix this all you need to do is go through your website and check that all the links are working. To save time, you can also use Google Search Console to detect broken pages. Just go to Crawl -> Crawl Errors -> Not Found.

Once you have found these pages you need to make sure the links redirect to the homepage and update the index so they do not show up in Google.

Update Previous Content

You can use your Google Analytics tool to check which pages are ranking low or use Sanity Check to check which pages haven’t been visited much at all.  

Once you have determined which pages aren’t getting a lot of love, you can go in and improve it the content. Content is key when it comes to your website, it can help up your rankings, keep visitors on your site or subscribe to your newsletter. If you have great content then people will likely share the page, giving you better exposure.

So check through old content and give it a revamp. Make sure to pad it out with useful content, use long-tail keywords and include good imagery. If you find you cannot add to it, then ask yourself is it worth keeping? Especially for the ones where there are no visitors.

Offer Incentives, free trials and more

When it comes to new businesses, people can be a bit skeptical. We are creatures of habit and tend to go back to the same place for things, so when a new business comes about, we may be curious but most of the time do not use their service.

To overcome this, you can try and give new customers an incentive to use your service. A lot of companies have new customer discounts or free trial periods for their services. This gives a customer a reason to sign up - for the first purchase at least!

This technique is really effective as you are attracting new customers to your business and most customers, if they have had a good experience, will continue using the service.

All of these tips are great low cost marketing options for your business and probably do not cost more than £100.

For other marketing help that is low cost or free, check out our other blogs!

Content Marketing for Small Businesses

PR Tips on a Budget

Crucial Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

Targeting a Local Audience