Ten Best Affordable Marketing Strategies

Affordable marketing strategies guide your choices of marketing activities so that they too are affordable as well as effective.

The top ten affordable marketing strategies mostly involve research and planning, which you can do for yourself.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 1 - Determine Your Target Market: I put determining your target market first because all other marketing strategies base on it. If you are trying to market to everybody, you are not marketing to anybody effectively.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 2 - Get To Know Your Target Market Members: Once you’ve selected your target market, you now need to learn how old they are, what they do for a living, how much education they have, and whether your market is specific to gender or race. These demographics then tell you how your target market members think, what they value, what they need to know, and the media they trust for information.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 3 - Determine Your Competition: Now you need to decide who your competitors are and learn as much as possible about their businesses and products.

You can record each competitor in a table column with each feature and benefit in rows below. Then put a minus for each competitor’s weakness and a plus for each strength.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 4 - Distinguish Your Business or Product From Your Competitor’s: Next compare your business and product to theirs. Use the table you did in strategy 3, and add your business or product to it. This will help you to see where you are strong in an area that most of your competitors are weak. This strength becomes your distinguishing characteristic.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 5 - Establish A Marketing Goal: Now decide what you most want to accomplish with your marketing. This is your primary marketing goal. It should include how you can best communicate your distinguishing characteristic to your target market.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 6 - Select Objectives To Meet Your Goal: Your marketing objectives lead systematically to your marketing goal. They are the steps to the destination where you want your marketing efforts to take you.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 7 - Select Your Most Important Marketing Message: This message becomes a constant in all your marketing tactics. It is your key message and should tell your target market members how your product or business benefits them more than your competitor’s. You should communicate it in one clear concise sentence or phrase.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 8 - Decide Which Media Will Reach Your Target Market: After completing your target market profile, you’ll know what media your target market prefers. Create marketing messages that are appropriate for your target market members and their preferred media.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 9 - Start Your Marketing Efforts: Now it’s actually time to start taking action. All the strategies so far prepare you to produce marketing tactics that will lead to meeting your marketing goal.

Keep good records of your marketing efforts. Record each tactic, what it cost you and what you made from it.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 10 - Evaluate Your Marketing Efforts: Now it’s time to use those records that you collected in strategy 9. They will enable you to make sound decisions about which marketing tactics worked effectively and should be repeated, compared to those that didn’t provide an acceptable return on investment.

These ten affordable marketing strategies save you money by assuring that you spend your resources only on effective marketing tactics.