A marketing to-do list for companies with tiny marketing budgets

This is a blog post dedicated to the little guy. The local business on the corner trying to make ends meet, knowing they should be spending more on marketing but can’t.

Checklist of the best marketing tactics for companies with tiny budgets:

Company reviews

• Ensure every customer leaves a review for your business on your Google My Business profile - simply asking your customers can go a long way.

• Google reviews help drive more visibility to your listing and website.

• Build reviews on 3rd party websites too. In the marketing agency business a website like Clutch.co helps businesses find marketing agencies. There's undoubtedly a platform for your business too.

Email or whatsapp marketing

• Offer something low cost to you but high value to your customers in exchange for their email addresses. Building an email or WhatsApp list helps with communicating new stock or new sales to your customers.

• Send an email to your customers at least once a month - current customers would actually appreciate hearing from you.

• Send reminders - reminders should be sent for any event, webinar, email or offer you send out. 

Marketing strategy

• Test one marketing channel at a time - many publishers (Google, Reddit, Twitter etc) offer incentives to new advertisers. You can use these vouchers to test to see if the channel actually wins you new customers before adopting a multi-channel strategy.

• Create focused marketing activity - there’s no point in trying to do everything and post on social media, create content, run paid ads, create email sequences and so on with limited budget as your time is most likely even more limited. Rather create focused activity and work that creates results.

• Position yourself and your business as the expert in your industry - this can be done through further training, testimonials, certifications, publishing and speaking.

• Recognize that your business needs a mechanism for generating customers on a consistent basis - having idle time can be just as detrimental as not testing or knowing how to attract new customers.

• Invest in scalable marketing channels or leverage - marketing efforts need to be able to scale in order to achieve scalable growth. Invest in the areas in marketing that can do this such as email, content or paid media marketing.

• Do the basics well - know who your high value customers are intimately, where they are, how you should target them and how you can add value to their lives. 

Paid media

• Run a paid media test campaign. As a proponent for paid media, I'd be remiss for not mentioning it.

  • Google, Reddit, X, TikTok and periodically Meta provides new advertisers with vouchers to start advertising to customers.

Content creation (organic marketing)

• Choose a platform (YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit) and start creating and publishing. This sounds overly simplistic and time-consuming. However, if you factor in that you create your content once which helps your business recurringly, it becomes a no-brainer.

  • A politician in New York won the primary in July2025 because he created a cult following with simple short videos on TikTok.

Remember, less is more, you don’t have to do everything all at once - you do have to do 1 or 2 of these items to start the inbound machine for your business.