35 marketing tips for small businesses on limited budgets PDF

35 Marketing Tips for Small Businesses on Limited Budgets - OnTheGrid
http://onthegridagency.com/2016/01/35-marketing-tips-for-small-businesses/[2/26/16, 1:33:03 PM]

35 Marketing Tips for Small
Businesses on Limited
Budgets
There's a reason why they initially called the internet the world wide
web. Our super information highway is HUGE! Today, everyone has
their own website, blog, Facebook page, etc. It is no longer easy to
stand out among the crowd. So while the old business proverb of
You have to spend money to make money may be true, for many
small businesses and startups, spending A LOT of
1.425.922.3210 | hello@onthegridagency.com
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money just isn't feasible. But with thousands of articles about
marketing tips out there, how do you know where to spend your
precious time and resources?
Being a small business in the online marketing field, we've read a
gazillion articles, taken the latest online marketing classes and tried
hundreds of techniques to grow ours and our client's businesses. We
know how daunting online marketing can seem so we thought it'd be
helpful to share our own marketing tips and instead of saying they're
all equal, we added tags so you can see how each one benefits us.
Time Saver
Money Saver
Growth Generator
Top Tip
1. Add Social Links to Your Signature
You can invite people to visit your business’s Facebook page, your
Twitter feed and LinkedIn profile every time you send them an email
with a custom-built signature. You can create your own, but folks at
Wisestamp have made it so easy to use one of their templates for
free. And if you want to splurge a little, you can pay a bit more to get
something that is uniquely “you” but still looks professional.
2. Use Your Social Media Header for Sales
While you shouldn’t go overboard with the promotion of your
product in your social media profiles (and in some cases you can’t),
you might as well use every pixel available to help promote your
business. For instance, social media guru, Kim Garst, regularly
features messages like “I just added 100,000 subscribers to my

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email list in a year” and then provides a call to action. Who could
resist an offer like that? Or here’s an example from Netflix
promoting one of their shows:
3. Use Canva to Create Social Sharing Images
We are all familiar with social posts that feature
inspiring or funny messages that can go viral in no time at all. There
are two tricks to make these kitchen-magnets-for-the-internet work:
(#1) Write something witty or inspirational and (#2) Create a great
design. If your idea of creating artwork is drawing stick figures, you’ll
appreciate Canva. Canva is a design service that helps you create
stunning social media images that will elevate your business in a
heartbeat. And it’s FREE! Canva is by far the best value of any tool
we’re using today, we can’t recommend it enough. Need a second
opinion? Neil Patel also swears by Canva and uses it to design
sharable images for Facebook.

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(Are you using Canva yet? How ’bout now?)
4. Use Post Planner for Sharing Great Content
If you want people to continue to engage with
you on social media, you need to regularly feed them great content.
This can take you away from more valuable projects if you’re having
to search for articles all on your own, but if you enlist the help of a
service like Post Planner, you can save yourself heaps of time. Post
Planner is a social media management tool used by over 200,000
marketing professionals. It’s an affordable, simple, yet powerful way
to source ‘most shared’ content and easily repost it on Facebook
and Twitter. In no time at all you’ll be a go-to source for the latest
and greatest information. Here’s how we use Post Planner for
maximum Twitter growth.
5. Catch an Udemy Course
The average commute time is 25.4 minutes, multiply that by two and
we’re each spending almost an hour in the car every day! Download
an Udemy course or two and listen to them while you drive, watch

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them on the treadmill or while you’re doing boring housework like
folding towels.
6. Include a Call to Action Button on Your
Facebook Page
A newish feature on Facebook is the Call-to-Action button that you
can adjust to read “Sign Up”, “Contact Us” or similar options. By
clicking on this button, Facebook visitors will go directly to the page
you select for them to visit on your website. Facebook explains how
to set this up. What they don’t explain is how to get the big blue
button – you’ll see some CTA buttons are small and grey, while
some are big and blue. If anybody knows, please enlighten us in the
comments below! Check out how Roxy uses their big blue button to
send people to their homepage:
7. Speak with Normal Words and Phrases
What are the three most overused words or phrases that mean
nothing? According to marketing and sales strategist David Meerman
Scott, they are “next generation,” “flexible” and “robust.” He wrote
about them in his Gobbledygook Manifesto stating that companies
are frequently using words over and over again that don’t really
mean anything. You might have a “robust” company, but what does
that actually mean to the consumer? Instead of being super general
with your writing, hone in on the specifics. Everyone will thank you for
it.

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8. Convert Your Blog Post Into a PDF
This is a killer tip we learned from Ana Hoffman, Traffic
Generation Cafe: To syndicate your writing quickly and easily, use
Print Friendly which can convert your blog post into a simple and easy
to read format in just a few minutes. The end product will contain
everything you want and nothing that you don’t. In fact, in the preview
window, you can select which items you would like to delete. All links
after page 3 are functional too – (it’s Slideshare’s way of preventing
spam). You can even set up your own Print Friendly browser tool and
website button for added convenience.
9. Create Evergreen Content
Unless your content contains information about an upcoming event,
avoid writing about subjects that will be obsolete in the near future
and instead opt for more “evergreen” content. As the name implies,
this is content that readers can benefit from whether they read it
now or three years from now. For instance, talking about a book sale
happening next week will be old news quickly, but a book review will
last until the next edition comes out. And the beauty of this content is
that it brings in traffic every month, – however small – when you
have multiple pieces of evergreen content working for you, it takes
you that much further away from zero visitors. Here’s a great
illustration of this from Hubspot:

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10. Create Multi-Use Content
It works with birds and stones (two birds, one stone) and it can work
for your business as well. When you sit down to write your next great
content piece, challenge yourself to make it longer than you need.
Then, edit it down to what is appropriate for each venue that you
choose to use. For instance, we like to create Slideshare
presentations and then turn that same content into blog posts and
vice versa, like this one “Growth Hacking With Facebook Ads.” You
might find that cutting your blog post into two separate articles might
be perfect to send to other websites as a guest post that links back to
your website. Each time you write something, ask yourself, “How can
I use this again?”
11. Give Your Old Content New Life
A lot of your old content can be used again without having to
write a whole new article. For example, chances are that your
Christmas post will be good to use next year as well. Add a few
tweaks here and there and re-publish it. Rand Fishkin goes into great
detail explaining re-publishing in one of his Whiteboard Friday's

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12. Promote Old Content
This goes hand-in-hand with #10 and #11. Continually go back
through your archives and pull out relevant and evergreen articles
and promote them on Facebook and Twitter as if they were fresh and
new. Chances are, many people in your network missed it the first
time. Another idea is to pull related content from your previous posts
and create a best of article.
13. Tweet More Than You Think is Necessary
Have you ever read through a whole day’s worth of tweets in
your Twitter feed? Nobody else does either (with the exception of
@DanClark29). Experts agree that the average lifespan of a tweet is
just 20 minutes. This means that the tweet you sent at 9 a.m. has
already been forgotten by 10 a.m. The answer to this problem is to
update your feed numerous times each day. Social guru Guy
Kawasaki tweets each tweet four times at eight-hour intervals. He's
on the extreme side. But test multiple tweets with your audience. If
you're still getting likes and retweets on each one, then you're
reaching more people and it's ok to keep it up. Here are three
different tweets by Michael Hyatt on Jan 28 about the same blog post:

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14. Use A Social Media Dashboard to Schedule
Your Tweets �T
You may be thinking #13 sounds daunting you're right, that's where a
good social media management tool like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Post
Planner comes in. It allows you to quickly create and schedule
multiple tweets at once for the times you want them to go out. Spend
a couple hours and schedule them all for the week so you don't get
sucked in to the social universe each day.
15. Pick One Social Platform
We all know that companies large and small need an online presence,
but sometimes, less is more. Instead of spreading yourself too thin
and posting infrequently on all social media channels, be choosey
and do a good job with one social channel, like Facebook. Do this for
a month, and move on to Twitter for a month then go Reddit, and
back to Facebook. Do this while you learn and soon enough you’ll be
able to handle more than one at a time.
16. Just Write

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If you want to be relevant in this dog-eat-dog-world, you need to have
fresh, relatable content. You may hate writing but do it anyway or hire
a freelancer and keep in mind that your efforts will pay off later down
the road.
17. Make Your Business More Transparent
From the colonel’s 11 secret herbs and spices to McDonald’s secret
sauce, businesses have kept many of their secrets to success under
wraps. The fear of course is that if you give away all your secrets,
customers will no longer come to you or your competitors will use
them against you. However, modern business leaders are realizing
that this risk is worth it and if you actually share some of your secrets
or show others what you do to succeed, you’ll look like a more
“transparent,” and trustworthy source than those who don’t. To
get you started, here are 17 Ways To Increase Your Business
Transparency.
18. Update Your Social Profiles
Update all of your personal social profiles with your company
information so that your network of friends and family are aware of
where you work. Here’s my Facebook profile, notice the Into…

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Extra benefit: Maybe your mother will stop saying that she has no idea
what you do. And just as you update your personal profiles, be sure
to let all of your business social contacts know what your company is
all about by updating Linked In. This will also help assure that your
information shows up correctly in search results. Here’s an example
– Melanie Dodaro’s Linked In profile outranks everything else when
you search for her on Google. Go ahead, search for your name and
see which of your profiles could use some love.
19. Answer questions on Quora
If you are not familiar with Quora, you really should get to know her.

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It’s a website where people ask questions on just about everything
and “experts” (aka – “you”) answer them. Scan the list of
questions that you can answer with your great wisdom and then
include your contact info and a link to a relevant blog post on your
site. Don’t just give a short quick answer though. Be thoughtful and
leave them wanting more so that they will look you up. Keep in mind
these are ‘no-follow’ links which means whatever links you include
don’t help you rank better in search results, but they are great for
building awareness. We put Quora in the same category as Twitter –
helps you build your reputation.
20. Give a Review
Do you use a particular product that you just love? Tell others about it
on your blog or post a YouTube video of your review and then send
the link to the company who makes the product. Chances are, they
will post your information or at least give you a shoutout on Twitter.
For example, here’s this article being shared by @Wisestamp to
their 7K+ Twitter followers. A nice trade.
21. Get More Bang for Your Buck with SumoMe
SumoMe is a simple little WordPress plugin that’s
super easy to add to your blog – when readers come in to your site,
SumoMe helps them share your articles on social networks. In fact,

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see that little bar over to the left? That’s SumoMe. We’d really
appreciate it if you gave it a spin by sharing this article.
22. Slap a Logo on It
People may not remember your name, but they will remember a
snappy-looking logo. For all your correspondence, make sure that
your logo is there for all to see. This is especially true for sharable
images you create with Canva. When your well designed social posts
are getting shared around the Interwebs you want your brand
impressions to be adding up. Don’t miss out on this easy add-on.
Here’s one from fitness expert Chalene Johnson that was shared
571 times on Facebook.
23. Have a Bias for Action
If you want to survive in the business world, you have to have to
hustle. While you need to mix long term planning with short term
production, don’t wait until you have a plan before you start
marketing. All you planners out there, by the time it took you to plan
your next tweet and get approval, your competitor already scheduled

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20 – so start tweeting and don’t worry about making mistakes.
Essentially, you’ll be learning by doing because those 20 tweets will
be giving you data so you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t.
This same concept applies to everything you create for the internet,
especially in the early days when you’re trying to figure out how it all
works. Remember, even the experts had to learn somehow, their first
blog, Facebook post, and Tweet were probably all duds but they kept
at it and got better with each try.
24. Make a Memorable Business Card
Sure, people don’t use business cards like they used to, but they do
still use them. Today, you can do so much more than just print your
name in royal blue on white cardstock. Online services like Moo offer
many different templates to choose from and you can use other
snazzy tools to help save money on your designs. We chose two $10
stock images from Shutterstock that represented our brand and had
a ‘wow-factor’. We then used Canva to add our logo on top of the
image and uploaded both designs to Moo. Tip: Make sure you make
your Canva image about 10x the size Moo requires, that way it’s
high enough resolution for print. A box of cards will last a long time
and each can serve as a mini artwork that your contacts can take with
them to remember you by. Need some ideas? Here are 50 creative
business cards from Canva.
25. Toot Your Own Horn

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Better yet, have someone else do it for you. With permission, write up
a testimonial or case study from a recent customer and use it on
your website. Sure, you can tell the world how wonderful you are, but
if you can have someone else do it, you’ll be golden. There’s an art
to this so we’ll let Kissimetrics teach how to get Customer
Testimonials for your website.
26. Create a Slideshare with Your Company
Story
This might sound a little left field but it relates: What is a fan’s least
favorite type of superhero movie? The ones that focus on an origin
story. Yes, fans are curious how Bruce Wayne became Batman, but
they don’t want to sit through 60 minutes of a movie telling them
the whole story when a five minute montage will do (sorry,
Christopher Nolan). Many of your customers want to hear how your
company became your company, but they don’t want to read
umpteen pages to do so – and they won’t. Instead, tell your story
through Slideshare where your can break up the details in easy to
chew bite-size pieces like Piktochart:
1 of 40 

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27. Follow a Marketer
While we don’t advocate stalking fellow marketers, we do suggest
that you learn from the big dogs by following them on Twitter for
daily marketing tips. We recommend a couple of our
favs, @DMScott, @KimGarst and of course, you could follow
@OnTheGridAgency too. We won’t mind.
28. Wish Someone Happy Birthday
Wishing “happy birthday” to everyone you know on Facebook gives
you an excuse to keep in touch with them. Chances are, they will visit
your page to see what you’ve been up to, how many children you
now have and where you’re working. They might even check out
your website. It’s advertising in the form of a nice gesture.
29. Comment on Facebook
Another way of communicating with friends that you don’t see often
is to comment on their recent posts. Try to pick about three friends a
day and make an honest connection. Engaging with people on
Facebook, not only boosts your Facebook posts, it keeps you close to
the people that matter in your busy life.
30. Find Out What People Think of Your
Website
If you’re doing all this work to send people to your website, don’t
you want to make sure your website’s doing it’s job? One of our go-
to tools is User Testing – they’re fast and cheap, but watch out,
watching videos of people using your website can be addictive! The
best deal is UserTesting’s ‘Mobile App’ package which gives you
all the benefits of their Pro package at an amateur price – it says
‘mobile’ but any small business can purchase it. Here’s a User
Testing highlight reel to give you a taste of real-time customer tests:
https://youtu.be/aV6MTzIbBaA

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31. Get Help With Your New Business Name
Choosing your business name is the most important
first step on your way to a strong brand and a growing business. We
use SurveyMonkey to test different business names and always throw
in ones we don’t expect to win — ‘OnTheGrid’ was our wildcard
name yet people picked it as their fav in three different surveys. For
more on business naming, you can check out, 10 mistakes to avoid
when naming your business.

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32. Grow your mailing list, one email address at
a time. �^
“I have literally built a multi-million dollar business on the strength of
my email list.” Says Michael Hyatt, a NYT best selling author and
acclaimed Virtual Mentor. He goes on to say, “Ninety percent of my
income comes from it. Even today, my email list is still my number
one business priority—and asset.” – @michaelhyatt has over
115,000 subscribers. We recommend using a free email service like
MailChimp to help you manage all your email marketing.
33. Send Out a Regular Email
Create a regularly scheduled email to attract new visitors to your
website and keep communication going to your current customers.
Whatever you send, it should be valuable but that doesn’t mean you
need to spend a ton of time on it. Take a look at #15 from
Hubspot’s 15 Email Newsletter Examples We Love Getting in Our
Inboxes. Vero’s newsletter is straightforward, simple, and useful:

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How regular is regular? See what works best for your customers. A
daily email may be too often but a monthly one may not be frequent
enough.
34. Get your ebook cover designed on Fiverr
Fiver is a cheap marketplace where people offer services like
logo design, or resume writing for $5 (get it, FIVE-rr). We’ve had
some good and some bad experiences but we still use them from
time to time because no matter the results, it only costs $5. One
service that’s never let us down is professionally designed ebook
covers.

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35. And of Course, Always Include a Call to
Action
According to Hubspot, “A call-to-action (usually abbreviated as CTA) is
an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and
customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a ‘call’ to take an
‘action.’ The action you want people to take could be anything:
download an ebook, sign up for a webinar, get a coupon, attend an
event, etc. A CTA can be placed anywhere in your marketing — on
your website, in an ebook, in an email, or even at the end of a blog
post.

About OnTheGrid
OnTheGrid is a Seattle marketing agency and we believe that ultimately, marketing is all about growth. We
specialize in using data and technology to grow your business, beating other marketing companies on speed,
cost, and quality. We understand your audience and find the fastest, most efficient way to connect with them
whether it’s a new website, content marketing, social sales, search ads, you name it, we can do it all. Some may
think we’re techies, designers, or customer whisperers. The truth is we’re all three — we’re Growth Marketers.
And we eat progress for breakfast.
History
Established in 2015. OnTheGrid was founded to give companies access to modern marketing techniques and
grow their businesses efficiently. Founder, Jessica Jobes is a former Microsoft Director and spent 13 years in
Marketing, Design and Engineering roles. The last 8 years were spent on the Bing Engineering team — Bill Gates
favorite engineering team of all time. “When Bing.com launched in 2009, Google.com stopped growing in the US.
We worked hard for every inch of growth against Google using data and innovative technology and this is the
DNA I apply to my client’s companies.” – Jessica Jobes
About Jessica Jobes
Founder OnTheGrid Marketing Agency. Growthhacker, Womanintech, Femalefounder, Inbound, Seattle.
Find me on Twitter @JessicaJobes and LinkedIn /JessicaJobesSeattle
“Her broad background coupled with her ability to deliver under pressure day in and day out makes her a
unique talent. If you’re looking to maximize your impact, I can’t recommend Jess highly enough.” – Derrick
Connell, CVP Bing.com Microsoft
“Not only did Jess immediately ‘get me’ but she has a knack for producing communication materials that tell a
story, pulling out what I meant to say. If you’re a leader who needs a go-to person, hire this woman!” – Julie
Larson-Green, Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Microsoft

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35 marketing tips for small businesses on limited budgets PDF