5 Low-Budget Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Startups

Which eCommerce marketing strategies are worth the time and investment? And which ones are actually low-budget? Small businesses and startups often have a tight marketing budget to work with, which can make promoting your business a challenge. 

An effective marketing strategy is one that is cost-effective. It supports your financial goals at every stage of the startup’s journey. It should be crafted in a manner that generates profitable revenue, even at the growth stage, so that you can scale it and sustain it.

And, as you will learn from this post, you don’t need to spend a fortune. Here are five low-budget marketing strategies that will bring unbelievable visibility and consistency to your eCommerce startup.

Create a Killer Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing requires very little investment and gives unbelievable returns when done right. Note that this form of marketing has many sides and approaches, so you shouldn’t restrict yourself to only one approach. 

For a start, you can establish a company website where you share with the world everything about your business. You can add a blog section on the website where you add new content as regularly as possible, both to educate and entertain your audience. It will be helpful if you can present your content in easy-to-consume bits, e.g. in the form of videos, infographics, pictures, and podcasts. 

Another approach would be to guest blog for high-traffic websites and then add outbound links to your website. If your website has compelling content, your brand reputation will greatly improve through inbound and outbound marketing. And if you want to reach a wider clientele, it will be wise to hire trusted professional translation services to localize your online content.

Read More: Is Your Website Content Snackable?

Infuse Social Media Into Your Marketing Strategy

Creating social media platforms can significantly increase brand awareness and eventually help with your business’s sales. Despite platforms offering paid promotions and advertising, simply creating a platform for your company and beginning to post relevant, constant content will likely greatly impact your brand for the better. 

What you need to do though is research appropriate platforms that your target audience uses for optimal reach. For a start, you can create a Facebook page and use it to interact with your potential clients. Facebook pages are free to create. Other platforms that will help you appeal to your target audience include Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Depending on the nature of your startup it could be TikTok too. 

Note that a skilled social media manager will help you grow your social media profile by posting the right, relevant and engaging content. 

Remember that posting compelling content is just a small part of the social media marketing puzzle. You must follow that up by providing the best services possible for your customers and making genuine efforts to attend to their online questions and concerns. A happy and satisfied customer will always be your startup’s unpaid brand ambassador. Negative comments from unhappy customers, on the other hand, can greatly harm your brand’s reputation.

Read More: Mistakes To Avoid If You Don’t Want to Kill Your Startup’s Online Presence

Create An Effective SEO Strategy 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the cost-effective digital marketing strategies for startups to get pages to rank higher in the Search Engine Result Page (SERPs).

In other words, it is a method to grow your business by the efficient and effective use of available resources thereby improving the quality of your website. 

You have to identify keywords that could attract high traffic to your website. You can avail of online consultancy for the same. The reason it is smart advertising is that instead of cash investments it requires effort and time. To understand, comprehend and formulate strategies that are unique compared to your competitors. 

Although this method may be somewhat time-consuming, creating and transforming your content to be SEO-friendly should be a priority in your zero cost/low-budget marketing strategies. An effective way of working on this optimization besides having keywords and phrases throughout your site would be to create a blog page where your company can talk about relevant topics that your audience and consumers will be interested in. 

Read More: Everything You Need to Know About SEO and Domains

Claim Your Hashtag As A Low-Budget Marketing Strategy

Your company claiming a hashtag is a cost-efficient way to not only creatively brand yourself but allow consumers to follow and interact with your business. 

The hashtag has become one of the most valuable assets in any modern marketing campaign. Brands that haven’t invested the time and thought carefully about their hashtags and how they’re going to be used, will see far less impressive campaign results than those who do.

If you position your brand on hashtags that are not currently being used by your competitors, this will help differentiate your brand and get more attention from the users that are using that hashtag and less attention from your competitors.

But the most important thing that must be understood is that you cannot legally own a hashtag. The goal is that you use a chosen hashtag and people will eventually associate it with your brand. The hashtag selected should be a distinctive phrase or word associated with your company or messaging. 

After you choose it, use it! Include this hashtag in every tweet, with every image posted on Instagram or Pinterest, and every time you post on Facebook or Tiktok or any other platforms that support hashtags.

Build Your Own App As A Marketing Strategy

This one might seem like it is not that low-budget. But I can assure you that having an app for your business results in building a good brand image and the trust of the customer. People will be resistless in making the final purchase. It requires very little expense to set up a mobile application, and today there are tremendous amounts of apps that people use. You can infuse it with your creativity and make it unique. But make sure to optimize it for your audience.

So, when you have your app in addition to a website, the traffic on your online website can have prior experience and knowledge about your startup and then resorts to downloading your app, which results in many benefits. Like you have now access to some information about your customer, i.e. their email address or contact number, and can notify them about your offers or discounts.

It also leads to a direct relationship with the customer, and now you can monitor their purchasing patterns, and they can scroll through your attractive offers now and then. It will also build trust with your customer because the online method in an app is safe.

Just ensure that your app has the best UX so that clients can easily use it to place their orders and access customer support.

In Conclusion: Big marketing results don’t depend on big budgets

With these five low-budget marketing strategies, you will easily realize the power of the entrepreneur, regardless of how small your startup is. Your takeout here should be to speak about your ideas and to share your expert opinions with the people. You must strive to be different and shake up your niche.

If one strategy fails, try another. You will surely get a breakthrough in the end.

Good luck!