Guide to Low-Budget Digital Marketing

Marketing is expensive. Digital marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing, but most startups and small businesses can’t afford it.

If you play smart, you can use low-budget digital marketing strategies to grow your business quickly and be competitive.

This article explores the 10 best and most effective low-budget digital marketing techniques that you can use right away.

Cost of Digital Marketing

So, what’s the average monthly cost of digital marketing for a small business?

Digital marketing price is relative.

This is due to two main reasons:

1. Digital marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses all forms and formats of online marketing. So, a business might be using one or maybe two digital marketing channels, and its cost will be quite negligible compared to a business that’s using 10+ digital marketing channels.
2. Digital marketing price depends on several factors such as your location, business type, industry, marketing channel and type, your marketing goal, and much more. It’s pretty hard to come up with an average global cost for all the sectors.

The majority of businesses (up to 67%) pay between $50 and $6,000 per month for digital marketing services:

The actual cost depends on what specific services you opt for. As already stated above, digital marketing is a broad term that covers all forms of marketing that take place online. Here’s a good explanation of what digital marketing constitutes:

For instance, you can distribute your marketing budget between SEO and email marketing completely. Or, you can choose to spend it on content marketing, social media marketing, PPC, SEO, and video marketing.

Your budget allocation defines how you’ll spend on digital marketing per month.

The more budget you have, the higher your spending will be.

Low-Budget Digital Marketing Techniques

Effective digital marketing isn’t cheap.

Amazon, for instance, spends $22 million per month on Google Ads. You can’t beat that.

But you can opt for low-budget, cost-effective digital marketing options.

Here’s how…

1. Use Social Media

Average monthly cost: $0

Social media turns out to be the cheapest form of digital marketing when you do it yourself.

Organic social media engagement and reach might not work instantly like social ads, but it is equally effective. Most businesses need results fast on social media in the form of new followers, engagement, clicks, leads, and sales.

They turn to social media ads, which makes social marketing quick but not necessarily effective.

As much as 74% of people don’t like social media ads.

Organic reach, on the other hand, is slow but is more effective as it’s not intrusive by nature. The growth is slow but sure.

Here’s how you can use social media marketing for free without spending a dime on an agency or ads:

• Identify social media platforms that your primary audience uses. These shouldn’t be social sites that are famous, rather ones where you’ll find your audience.
• Create accounts on the selected social networking sites. Optimize your profiles by using best practices.
• Create a social media editorial calendar and post content regularly.
• Engage with the community by liking, commenting, and sharing other people’s posts and content.
• Continue publishing new content even if you don’t see any engagement. Be consistent.
• Use relevant hashtags to make your content searchable.
• Tag relevant people and accounts like influencers.
• Use free design, video creation and editing, and AI tools to create social content.
• Track performance and tweak your strategy.

Read more about organic social media reach in this detailed guide.

2. Start Your Blog

Average monthly cost: $0 – $500

A blog helps your business with content marketing, which is one of the core pillars of digital marketing.

You can attract targeted traffic via your blog from search engines. It’s a perfect low-budget digital marketing strategy that’s ideal for long-term, sustainable growth.

Businesses that publish new blog posts per month get higher organic traffic. Blogs that publish 16+ posts per month get 2x more organic traffic than blogs that publish 5-10 posts per month:

You can start a business blog free of cost, as it only requires installing a CMS on your existing domain.

The challenge is publishing new content on your blog – and that’s where you need to spend money.

You have a few options that define how much blogging will cost you:

• If you create content yourself, it’ll be free.
• Outsourcing blog posts is a cost-effective option where you can hire a freelancer from Fiverr or Upwork. The cost per blog post varies, but the starting price is approximately $100 per post. If you hire a niche expert, the price will be much higher.

Let’s say you want to publish one blog post per month to start with and decide to hire a freelance writer. It’ll cost you around $400 for 4 posts a month.

Not bad. It’s still pretty low-cost.

Follow these additional guidelines to make blogging more cost-effective for your business:

• Create an editorial calendar and start with 2-4 posts per month
• Do proper keyword research and target the right keywords
• Use WordPress as it’s a free CMS suitable for blogging
• Install a free WordPress theme to keep expenses to a minimum
• It’s best to write a few initial blog posts yourself and then outsource them at a later stage
• Be prepared for long-term growth. Don’t expect miracles quickly.

3. Outreach for Backlinks

Average monthly cost: $0

This goes with blogging.

And outreach can be done free of cost.

But first, what exactly is outreach and what role does it play in digital marketing?

Outreach refers to connecting with relevant sites, individuals, and businesses to promote your content, product, and business. It focuses on building relationships with other businesses.

It is excessively used for link building.

When you create content for your blog, you need to promote it so it ranks better in search engines. Backlinks are among the top Google ranking factors having the highest impact on rankings:

The best thing about outreach is that you can do it free of cost. You don’t need any email marketing tool or an outreach app for it. Simply use your email provider to send personalized emails to the right people.

Here’s an example of an outreach email for link building:

Outreach isn’t just limited to email. You can use other channels to connect with relevant businesses, blogs, and influencers such as:

• Social media
• Forum or private group
• Phone call
• SMS.

Ideally, you should opt for a multichannel approach where you connect with your target through multiple channels.

Follow these guidelines to use this low-budget digital marketing technique to acquire backlinks for your site:

• Choose your best blog post
• Reach out to sites that have already linked to similar content
• Show them your content and ask for a backlink. This only works if your content is better than the content they are already linking to
• Create infographics, media, video, and other forms of unconventional and interactive content that’s more likely to get backlinks
• Use LinkedIn to connect with relevant people in your niche
• Keep building connections and growing your network.

4. Guest Post

Average monthly cost: $0

Guest posting is the best form of low-budget digital marketing for two main reasons:

1. It is a highly effective way to promote your business and reach your target audience.
2. Guest posts deliver results in multiple ways. It’s not just about backlinks.

Jenny, for instance, acquired more than 200 backlinks from top authority sites in one year with guest blogging. This breaks down to 15+ links per month at potentially zero cost.

Obviously, you must have experience and expertise in your niche (read more about E-E-A-T and its importance here). The more experience you have, the better for guest posting:

Guest blogging helps you:

• Reach a new audience on a new platform
• Boost brand awareness and authority
• Get natural, quality backlinks
• Get referral traffic, new followers, and branded searches
• Build new connections and networks
• Promote your existing content.

And it doesn’t cost you any money.

It’s because you have to manually find host blogs, send personalized emails based on specific requirements, and follow editorial guidelines.

Automating guest posting outreach is a bad idea as it will significantly reduce response rate and you’ll end up with low-quality sites.

How to get started with guest blogging?

Here are a few best practices that’ll help you kickstart your first guest posting campaign:

• The host blog should be relevant to your niche or industry. Avoid publishing content on irrelevant sites.
• Try to engage with the readers of the host site. Follow their guidelines. Check out what type of content gets the most engagement on their blog and try to replicate the same.
• Focus on delivering quality, helpful content. Backlinks shouldn’t be your primary priority.
• Always add an author bio with links to your site and social accounts.

5. Create Google Business Profile

Average monthly cost: $0

You don’t have to have a local business to set up a Business Profile on Google. Any business can do it.

Google Business Profile is free and helps you connect with people who find you on search and Google Maps. You can manage your business easily and at no cost at all.

It’s ideal for:

• Local SEO
• Brand awareness
• Generating leads and sales
• Boosting search visibility
• Improving credibility.

Research shows that people are up to 70% more likely to visit your site and 50% more likely to buy from a business having a Business Profile. Additionally, customers consider such businesses 2.7 times more reputable if they have completed and optimized their profiles on Google Search and Maps.

It clearly has a massive impact on your local business. This is the most effective low-budget digital marketing technique that transforms your brick-and-mortar business instantly into an online business.

Here’s how to get started with Google Business Profile:

• Claim and verify your business by creating an account here
• Add all the relevant details and complete your profile. This includes business name, phone number, address, description, products and services, website, posts, customer reviews, and more
• Add relevant keywords to optimize your listing
• Answer questions and respond to reviews
• Add quality photos of your business and products
• Keep business details updated all the time
• Share your profile with your existing customers and ask them for reviews.

6. Join Niche Forums

Average monthly cost: $0

Here’s another highly effective low-budget digital marketing technique that you can use for any business type across all sectors.

Niche forums are specific discussion forums that are focused on a tight niche or industry. For instance, Stack Overflow is a forum and Q&A site for developers, programmers, and tech professionals.

You can find these types of highly specific forums on a wide range of niches and sectors.

These forums provide you with an opportunity to build a community, grow your business, and boost your authority and thought leadership.

The only downside is that it demands consistency.

You have to prove yourself to the community that you have relevant experience, expertise, and knowledge that make you stand out. You have to showcase your expertise free of cost by regularly helping forum members by addressing their issues.

It’s a long-term, low-budget digital marketing approach that is essentially helpful in:

• Building a community
• Proving yourself as a thought leader
• Improving brand awareness
• Driving referral traffic to your website.

You can also drive search traffic to your site via forums. Google now ranks forums on the first page and lets users find more forums and discussion-based search results:

Here’s how to use forums for marketing your business free of cost:

• Find forums in your niche and sector. Look for a broad category if you don’t find specific niche-based forums
• Look for relevant communities where people ask questions about your business or products
• Join the most active forums
• Optimize your profile. Add social links and website links
• Start engaging with the community without promoting your business or products
• Help members without pitching your product
• Build reputation and credibility
• Be consistent and do it regularly to see results.

7. Use Reddit and Quora

Average monthly cost: $0

These two sites are a goldmine for your business as they offer the best value when used smartly.

Google now ranks Reddit and Quora questions in SERPs as they are considered more valuable, helpful, and authentic.

As a user, you’d like to see an answer from someone who is an expert in the field rather than a business trying to sell its products as a solution.

That’s what makes these sites highly reputable and trustworthy.

And you can use them to build authority, trust, and credibility that help your business in the long run. It’s the best form of low-budget digital marketing strategy that works for all types of businesses.

Si Quan Ong generated around 1 million views on Quora in a year. All he did was answer up to 5 questions per week around his company and niche:

The same applies to Reddit. Here’s how the Washington Post uses Reddit to connect with its audience. It shares breaking news on Reddit that generates massive buzz and brand engagement:

You need to add these two sites to your marketing strategy and get serious about them.

There are a few things you need to consider and keep in mind when using this low-budget digital marketing approach:

• Choose your niche smartly by sticking with your primary field of expertise. If you don’t have experience in something, don’t talk about it
• Showcase your credentials and tell others what makes you qualified and an expert in the field. That’s how you’ll gain trust
• Be consistent. You might not see traction instantly. It needs a lot of time and patience. Consider it a long-term, low-budget digital marketing strategy
• Don’t sell, rather help others. Selling or linking to your site regularly is a bad idea on these two platforms.

8. Employee Ambassador Program

Average monthly cost: Under $500

An employee ambassador or employee advocacy program allows your employees to become advocates and ambassadors of your brand. They represent your business across the internet to boost awareness, trust, and sales.

It’s a decent low-budget digital marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes as long as you have a few employees.

Here’s how an employee advocacy program works:

It requires employee training, approvals, and a certain level of management. It’s not a set-and-forget marketing technique. You need to oversee your program and tweak it as needed.

This obviously costs you time and money.

There are multiple types of costs associated with an employee ambassador program:

• Platform fee. You can skip this if you run the ambassador program manually which is quite possible
• Employee rewards that could be either monetary or non-monetary
• Tracking and maintenance require additional human capital to oversee your program.

It’s not one of the cheapest digital marketing strategies, but it’s highly effective in the long run. And it saves you a ton of dollars.

Imagine having your social media marketing outsourced to your employees who publish new content on your behalf. This alone saves you heaps of capital.

Here are a few tips and tricks to run your program successfully on a low budget:

• Run and manage it manually instead of using a platform. This will save you a lot of money
• Assign specific tasks to your employees, such as posting on their social platforms weekly or publishing a fixed number of posts on the company blog per month
• Reward employees fairly. If they aren’t getting paid for being an advocate of the company they work for, they won’t do it
• Keep it challenging and interesting for your employees
• Run in-house competitions and contests to keep your employees hooked.

9. Repurpose Existing Content

Average monthly cost: $0

Content repurposing is a perfect low-budget digital marketing idea that works free of cost.

The only downside is that you have to have existing content in any form to leverage content repurposing.

Here’s how it works:

1. Take any existing content that you have. It could be a blog post, social media post, video, webinar, infographic, guest post, PDF, whitepaper, case study, lead magnet, etc.
2. Transform the same piece of content into another format for a new channel. For instance, you can generate social media posts from a blog post, or you can generate a blog post from a video tutorial, and so on.
3. Publish the new content on relevant channels and touchpoints to reach a new audience. For instance, you can create PPTs and submit them to SlideShare to reach your audience there.

You can repurpose content without spending any money. You might have to use a few apps, such as a video editing app or a design tool, to deal with certain types of content, but you can stick with free platforms to minimize your cost.

Follow these guidelines to take content repurposing to the next level:

• Choose your best performing, evergreen content for repurposing
• Select the right channels and touchpoints
• Focus on content formats and platforms that are liked by your target audience.

10. Customer Referral Program

Average monthly cost: $100

You can work with your customers to bring in new customers. This low-budget digital marketing strategy offers you new customers at a very low cost. It reduces your average customer acquisition cost and increases customer lifetime value (CLV).

Here’s how a customer referral program works:

There are two types of costs associated with running a referral program:

1. The cost of the referral program platform which is usually in the $100 per month range (for the most popular apps). Unfortunately, you can’t run and manage a referral program manually as it involves advanced tracking attribution.
2. Incentive or reward costs to customers. It depends on the type of referral program you are using (single-sided vs. double-sided) and the incentive you give to your customers. Up to 57% of customers expect to receive discounts from brands.

It’s best to offer double-sided rewards as it makes your referral program attractive for customers. Ideally, you should use discounts and coupons that customers can redeem with your brand. This will help you retain customers and increase average order value.

In any case, a referral program is a great digital marketing technique that you can run with a low budget.

Bonus Low-Budget Digital Marketing Techniques

Here are more affordable digital marketing strategies you can use:

• Use video content: Average monthly cost – $500
• Attend events: Average monthly cost – $100-$500
• Work with micro-influencers: Average monthly cost – $200-$500.

Where to Get Started

The low-budget digital marketing strategies discussed above will give you a head start. You can choose the ones that align with your marketing strategy.

Don’t choose a technique based on its average cost, rather pick the ones that are likely to work for your audience and business.

How’d you know it?

Data.

Use analytics to figure out what type of marketing techniques and strategies have historically worked for your brand. And then choose based on what’s more likely to work.

Monitor performance and tweak the strategy to improve it.

Once you have successfully implemented one low-budget digital marketing approach, move to the next.

Featured Image: Pexels