If you have a bricks and mortar store, you can get a map of your city and using past customer data, put a red dot on every address on this map. You will quickly begin to see clustering. This will help you to determine what are the hot spots for direct mail distribution or other direct strategies.

With only $1K to spend you want to be sure you are hitting your optimum targets. Buying open lists do nothing to address yout actual target audience. If you discover in your demographic profile data that many of your customers are church goers or some other group activity you can then target more of the same, since people generally follow trends. If for instance that group is Christian in nature then perhaps target the largest Christian websites and congregations. With large congragations, offer a small percentage of each sale to them as a fundraising effort. If the churches are over 10,000 parishioners this could equal a substantial growth in sales. You may also be able to to deduct those % of sales as a donation (tax deduction) depending on how it is structured, but I’m no accountant).

When you have very little money targeting is crutial.

$150 – car/window decal done by a professional sign making company. I drive a lot and this exposure has proven to work in other businesses like mine.

$0 – this only requires my time (a few hours at the library or on the computer) to build my own mailing list using addresses in specific neighborhoods, demographic sects and targeted areas locally. This is a better option for me than buying a mailing list because my personal touch allows me to know exactly who I’m sending which materials to.

$400 – printing of targeted brochures, postcards, marketing materials or supplies for handmade promotional items for the mailing list I just created above. I have several different types of brochures based on the nature of each audience. (wedding, baby, travel, military, etc.)

$200 – postage to mail those materials above (this will reach about 500 people – but I would rarely do a mailing this large all at once. My typical mailing is about 75 per week so these expenses are spread out over time.)

$100 – printing of color posters or fliers to be displayed at prime locations where my target audience frequents (boutiques, high-end photo processors, professional office or medical buildings, etc.) Yes – this one requires some legwork but I’ve had good success with it so far.

$100 – printing of postcard/coupons to be distributed to customers at my main partner locations and maybe a gift of some sort for those few business owners who help to promote my business. These are businesses where they have allowed my business cards to be displayed alongside theirs in their retail store.

$0 – follow up, follow up, follow up. What’s that stat I read so much about… “80% of sales happen after the 8th follow up call” … or something like that. So all that effort I put into my mailing list and mailings, I still need to make those follow up calls in order for it to be worthwhile.

So, just a little different perspective from someone who doesn’t rely on the Internet for sales. My business is a “touch and feel” type thing… my clients don’t know that they want to hire me until they can touch, feel and see samples of my work. Online photos don’t hold the same emotional involvement as my in-person marketing does.

Pam Tremble
Scrapbooks by Pam

After you have read all these posts – don’t do any of them – use these ideas to develop your own type of marketing because what you will probably see here is what most people are doing – being unique will not last for long once it is seen but it will give you a head start and probably benefit you more in the end.

However that being said there are probably some new business owners here with no clients or maybe only one or two who may need to start from scratch so they would appreciate any other methods to market with a $1000 budget.

Service and value are the best marketing tools you have on a budget.

Firstly, $1000 isn’t a lot of money. Just like a prudent investor, you should never invest your marketing budget in only one or two untested areas.

For example – direct mail. Let’s say you rent a list for $300 and mail 1000 letters. Turns out the list was as old as the hills and you get minimal response (I’ve seen this happen several times, even with good copy).

Now you’ve blown your marketing budget!

With a budget of this size, I would suggest spending no more than $200 on any one marketing activity, and also parlaying the resources of others to stretch your budget further.

Host-beneficiary or Joint venture relationships with complementary businesses are an example of this. In many cases, you need hardly any money up front to aquire customers in this way.

If you have a high converting site and you know what you’re doing, Google Adwords is also a great bet – it normally produces great ROI.

PR is another option that doesn’t require a lot of ca$h and can work well, but again, you need to do it right to make it work.

In general, I would advise against any “scattershot” marketing activities such as flyers or untargeted ads.

Targeted marketing promotions invariably have a superior ROI.

The business I plan to launch this year is a retail business (which to begin with will be exclusively online). I still feel the need to do some offline advertising.

S.

Just my thoughts. I realize they are far different that most of you, who work primarily in the internet and computer worlds.

You have to target your visitors; the best way in my opinion is to find quality weblogs and content websites related to your business (there are a lot of business blogs now out there) from where you’ll not only get a lot of traffic but most of this traffic will be targeted. Most of the weblogs charge between $20-$100 per month (it depends what kind of ad you want to put in).

Let’s say you find 4 related blogs and each charge $50/month for a medium size banner. That will give you 5 months of quality traffic.

-Craig

Can’t beat a good sales letter to boost sales

Just a thought but set up a landing page and control ads with Adwords and give away an Ipod or something that would get customers to give you their information for marketing purposes… i am sure this has been tried before but depending on the business you are in it could really work to boost Word of Mouth. Just a thought