It’s not too early to start.

June to August are great months for planning and starting your autumn marketing campaign.

This is particularly true now as budgets are tight and potential clients are few and far between, so planning your marketing and starting early is more important than ever before.

Marketing on a low budget

Less than £600 for June to November (incl.)
This is a plan that should cost you time and about £80 each month.

Part 1 LinkedIn Navigator – approx. £70 – £80 per month
This will give you access to targeted databases and this is why you will need time.

These are the criteria you select:

  1. A market you want to target.
    – This will download a list, then
  2. The geographic region you want to target.
  3. The age of the company, if relevant.
  4. How many people in the company, if relevant
  5. The job title of the contact you want to reach – there may be several

Now you have a list of contacts to investigate
Click on each name and if you decide they are of interest to you, send them a message by clicking the three dots next to the word message and then connect.

Your first message
It is important that you regard this as an introduction and not a sales letter. You keep it within 300 characters, including spaces.

Here’s a fictitious example:

“Hello XXXXX
I would like to introduce XYZ company,
Founded in 1987, we provide:
Airconditioning systems
Extraction systems
Air filtration units
Please have a look at our website – http://www.xyx.com
Link up if we can be of help either now or in the future
Regards
Charlie”

That’s 271 characters, including spaces
You send this first message to all your potential contacts.
I would recommend doing this every working day for an hour.

Your reply message
You will have between 10 – 25% link up, so you need a second message.

Here’s a fictitious example:

Hello again, XXXXX
Thanks for linking up.
If you would like to talk about any of our services, just call us on xxxxx-xxxxxx
By the way, watch out for our blogs and messages here on LinkedIn.
With kind regards
Charlie

Add these people to your database and add their telephone numbers and email address.

In Conclusion

Each day you are building an audience who have an interest in what you do, so you need to provide them with messages and blogs to read.

I recommend a message on Facebook and LinkedIn every working day and a blog a month.

This is really where you spend your time on top of the LinkedIn work.

I would say that preparing a list of messages – one line with a telephone number and website address will take up to 2 hours per month, and the same for the blog.

So, you will have used a few hours during the month, and it will only cost you about £80.

In that time, you have increased the number of people who know about you, and some of those will buy in the future – now that’s marketing on a low budget!