Affordable marketing strategies are not specific marketing tactics and activities. But they help you choose affordable tactics that work effectively.

The marketing strategies listed here are affordable because you can do them with just a little planning and research.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 1 - Decide Who Is Your Target Market

You can’t market to everybody so you have to decide who is most likely to buy your product or service and market directly to them. They are your target market and your most important marketing strategy.

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.

A table works well for recording your competitors, along with the weaknesses and strengths of each. Make a column for each competitor and a row for each benefit or feature. Then use minuses to note weaknesses and pluses to note strengths.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 4 - Determine How Your Business Differs From The Competition

Once you’ve completed the table for strategy 3, you can quickly see your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Now add your business to the table and look for where you have a plus but nearly all your competitors have a minus. This is what best distinguishes your business from theirs.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 5 - Set Your Marketing Goal

Set a goal for your marketing that includes how you will distribute the message about your distinguishing characteristic to your target market members.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 6 - Determine Your Objectives

Now backtrack from your goal to decide the steps it will take to reach that goal. These steps become your marketing objectives.

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 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.

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

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.

These ten marketing strategies used together are not only affordable, but will save you from wasting money on ineffective strategies.

Save time. Select from 20 Complete Target Market Profiles or watch a video and learn to Create Your Own Target Market Profile. You can get a unique content version of this article.

Submitted to Article Directories 4-22-08: Ten Best
Affordable Marketing Strategies

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