It’s always wise to be practical with your expenses, regardless of your particular situation. People can sometimes be filled with shock, amazement, and usually anger when they hear of a celebrity or athlete who at one point was worth hundreds of millions of dollars but is now penniless and completely bankrupt. Even the mega-wealthy need to carefully budget their finances, even if it’s on a larger scale than most of us will never come close to.

For anyone that has started up a small business, frugality is something they are undoubtedly intimately familiar with. For the first few years, tough financial decisions are made on a highly frequent basis – often, key aspects of the business are pared down dramatically or omitted completely in order to stay afloat. One of those aspects that usually gets tossed by the wayside is marketing.

Many new business owners are faced with trying to manage bills, making sure that payroll will be met, and still figuring out the most efficient and effective way to run the business on a daily basis. When confronted with those critical tasks, marketing is something of an afterthought usually – but it doesn’t have to be, nor should it be. After all, if you don’t market yourself and your business, how can you expect to grow your customer base?

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How to stretch your business’s dollar for marketing & advertising

There are a lot of ways in which you, the small business owner, can still run an effective marketing campaign on a tight budget. We’ll highlight a few guidelines and methods that will allow you to get the word out about your business without having to take the hammer to the proverbial piggy bank.

1.  Determine your budget

This is more of a foundational step that isn’t doing any outbound marketing, but it’s a critical one. You must have a clear picture in mind of what you’re willing (and more importantly, able) to spend on marketing. It can be zero dollars, or it can be in the tens of thousands depending on your business, but we’ll be focusing on the lower-end of budgets for the purposes of this article.

A good rule of thumb for many small businesses is allocating about five percent of your total yearly gross revenue toward marketing (e.g. – if your business grossed $500,000 in the year, an appropriate yearly budget would be $25,000). You can of course raise or lower this depending on your industry and your current financial situation, but it’s a good starting point. You might particularly consider increasing your percentage if you’re just starting out and need to inform people of your existence.

Once you have a number for your yearly marketing budget, divide it into a monthly or even weekly number. This will not only help you stay on track for the year, but it puts your budget in a more tangible light – $25,000 a year may seem like a lot, but $480 a week is a bit more accessible of a figure (especially considering that using the metric above, that business spending $480 a week in marketing is grossing over $9,600 a week).

2.  Develop a Plan

If you fail to plan, plan to fail. A bit clichéd, I know, but it really is true. Establishing your budget is a great first step, but you need to assign marketing activities to those dollars on a weekly or monthly basis in order for them to be effective. Say it’s January and you have a marketing budget of $1,000 for the upcoming month of February – you should have a pretty solid grasp on exactly which activities you’ll be carrying out before the calendar gets anywhere near February 1.

The more detailed your plan is and the farther it is forecast in advance, the more effective your marketing will ultimately be. Having a plan for each month is great, but try to get at least the fiscal or calendar year mapped out in advance – this will help prevent you from doubling up on efforts (e.g. – running a similar advertisement or carrying out a similar promotion). It will also prevent you from being reactive instead of proactive.

Having said that, however, don’t feel like if you have a great plan developed and mapped out that it’s somehow set in stone. You unfortunately won’t have access to a functional and accurate crystal ball, so you won’t know the future. Your big coupon promotion planned for May to coincide with the County Fair will have to be changed or nixed completely once the monsoon of the decade moves through and the Fair is cancelled.

3.  Utilize “free” marketing whenever possible

“Free” is used in quotation marks since any amount of time either you or an employee/contractor spends on marketing will affect your bottom line, but for all intents and purposes there are many things you can do to market your business that won’t cost you anything in terms of hard dollars spent.

Social media… Facebook, Twitter, you name it

The biggest of these freebies is to take advantage of social media. If your business doesn’t have a Facebook page, a Google+ profile, and a Twitter account, create them right away, it’s free advertising! If you are new to any or all of these social media platforms, consult with a friend, family member, or employee who is familiar with them and can assist you in getting the basics down (also, a quick Internet search will yield lots of great results on the basic steps to create a business page for pretty much every social media network imaginable).

They are free to set up and operate, and once completed, you’ll have access to the billions of users that frequent them. There is a science and etiquette to marketing on social media however, so do yourself a favor and read up/acquaint yourself with the best practices before diving in headfirst. Or you can check out our previous blog post regarding social media practices for small businesses!

Public Relations

Another free form of marketing that often gets overlooked is public relations. Many larger businesses hire high-dollar agencies to carry out their PR work for them, but that’s not an option when you’re trying to save as much money as possible.

The basic elements of public relations can be carried out all on your own, however – introduce yourself to all local media outlets, trade publications for your industry, and online communities that are related to your field. Offer yourself up as an industry expert for anyone looking for quotes for an interview or roundtable discussion participants. Try and pitch your business as a good story opportunity, especially if you’re about to kick off a charitable/community service oriented campaign. By familiarizing yourself with the right people and media outlets, you might be surprised at some of the stories your business might land and the visibility they’ll give you.

4.  Check Progress and ROI Regularly

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If that’s true, then the definition of wasting marketing dollars is to carry out the same campaigns and promotions over and over again without making sure they’re effective. Checking your return on investment, or ROI, is the most effective way to ensure that you’re not wasting your time and money.

Online ad spends, social media campaigns, and promotions with coupons or other traceable metrics are the most helpful. A small ad spend on Facebook will yield you with incredibly granular detail about who is seeing, and more importantly who is responding, to your content. And opting for a pay per click model of online advertising instead of a pay-per-impression model means you only pay for those that actively click through to your page – at a much higher rate, of course.

Print, radio, and television ads can be a bit harder to track ROI since you’re paying for gross impressions, but offering up a call to action with a code or keyword can really help. If you run a full-page ad in the local daily newspaper, consider making a prominent call-out that tells customers to bring in the ad to receive a special discount. You can have a firm count on how many people are motivated enough to come in due to your promotion and ad, which will be valuable when planning your next marketing event.

5.  Don’t be afraid to seek help!

Our final tip might be the most difficult for many small business owners. Many times, a business owner can know every in and out related to their industry or field of expertise, but not have the first clue about marketing. That’s perfectly understandable! But too often, that business owner will either attempt to become a marketing expert overnight rather than seek help, or jettison marketing altogether because they don’t understand its value. Don’t let that happen to you – there are a ton of valuable resources online that will help business owners from all levels of marketing knowledge from complete luddite newcomers who don’t really know what Twitter even is, to tech-savvy entrepreneurs who are looking how to take their already solid marketing plan to the next level.

Spend some time on small business forums (Open Forum is a great one!), read applicable trade publications and websites, and feel free to ask your competitors what they’re doing and what some of their notable marketing successes and failures have been. They might not want to share, but you’ll never know unless you ask.