3 Low Budget, High Impact Marketing Strategies

Feeling super excited to start your eCommerce business? But, maybe you’re worried about all the horror stories of people spending 1000s of dollars on marketing and getting zero sales… I’m going to keep it 100 with you. You don’t need thousands of dollars to market your eCommerce business. I know because I built my business to over $1m in revenue without paid ads 

Keep reading for 3 low-budget to no-budget marketing strategies that you can use to drive traffic to your store today. Be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom of this article to get the bonus strategy I prepared just for you!

The first low-budget marketing strategy you can implement in your eCommerce business today: Email marketing

If you’re already in business and you’re not collecting email addresses...start collecting email addresses! One of the biggest excuses I hear from my coaching clients that aren’t doing email marketing is that they don’t want to annoy the customers.

Someone willingly gives you their email address which communicates that they are really interested in buying your stuff and you’re afraid of annoying them? Are you trying to make some money or make friends?

Emailing interested customers about sales, special offers, educating them about your products is what they signed up for. So don’t be afraid to do it! You can use apps like Privy to capture emails via a pop-up when someone visits your website. 

Another low-budget marketing strategy that is free in terms of money, but definitely takes time: Building a community by creating content 

Marketing doesn’t only mean selling your products via Facebook ads or Google ads. When you create content that resonates, educates, or entertains your target audience, it will naturally form a community. You’ll get to know your audience and the products that you sell will make sense to them. 

Whether you post the content on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or Instagram. Create good content and they will come. Be willing to put in the work and spend time building a community by creating great content. Interact with the followers who are leaving comments and find other Instagram accounts to interact with. Do this, and you’ll drive a lot of free traffic to your store or site on an ongoing basis without spending a penny.

The next low-budget marketing strategy is influencer marketing. 

Influencer marketing is a social media marketing technique that involves collaboration between influencers and brand owners. Influencers are ‘internet celebrities’ on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok etc.  With thousands of loyal followers and many different popular niches, finding an influencer with the right audience to your niche can be very rewarding. It’s important that you reach out to influencers that make dollars and sense for your niche. 

A Viv Pro Tip: As small business, look for influencers that have 5-10k followers as they are likely to have really engaged audiences and may be interested in sharing your product with their audience for a lower budget or for exchange for the product or service.

Still here? Good! Here’s the bonus strategy:

SEO - Search engine optimization. 

SEO means optimizing your website’s content to make sure it's likely to appear as a top result when a user searches for a keyword on Google. The aim of SEO is to drive traffic to your website organically using both high-quality and high quantity keywords. 

The benefits of SEO is that it:

  • It generates free traffic

  • Grows brand awareness

  • Improves conversion rates

  • Helps to find new customers 

  • And is great marketing on a small budget

If you’re using Shopify as your eCommerce platform, they make it very easy to help bring traffic to your website and I can show you how in Shopify Prep School!

If you’re looking to start selling physical products online or if you already have an online store and want to learn how to master Shopify, you’ll want to join me for Shopify Prep School. Learn how to set up, manage, launch and scale your Shopify store.