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 - Learn As Much As Possible About Your Target Market Members: After choosing a target market, you gather information about their demographics, such as gender, education, age, occupation, and race. This information provides your target market members' attitudes, values, needs, etc. It even guides your media selection and marketing message topics.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 3 - Research Your Competitors: Next you need to think about what business you are really in and who else is in that business and competes for your customers' money.

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 - Determine Your Objectives: Once you know your desired marketing destination, you need to decide how you will get there. Each step toward your goal is an objective.

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 - Determine The Media That Best Reaches Your Target Market: Your target market analysis should provide you with information about the best media to reach your target market. Research that media so you can design messages that work well with it.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 9 - Start Taking Action: Finally, it's time to take action and implement your marketing tactics. All you did in strategies 1 - 8 pay off now by assuring the effectiveness of your marketing actions.

You also need to keep good records on what you spend and the results you get with each tactic.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 10 - Determine The Effectiveness of Each Tactic: The records from strategy 9 provide you with the information you need to determine which marketing tactics were effective and which weren't. Repeat the effective ones and eliminate the others.

Each of these marketing strategies are affordable and will save you money by helping you to spend your marketing resources only on tactics that will be effective with your target market.