Marketing on a budget

By: Erica Alarid-Heidel

So what if you are not a huge University with a large budget to spend on marketing. How are you able to maximum your efforts on a minimal budget? Here are a few helpful hits to get you started.

1) Endorsements:
We all know celebrity endorsements are a great form of marketing. People mimic what celebrities do and typically want to be like them. Use this to your advantage. Take a look at your alumni and current student rosters; is there anyone that is a local celebrity? Ask that person if they would be willing to do an add campaign promoting the school. If they are a local celebrity it should not cost you any money to get their help, usually the fact of being on TV or in the newspaper is exciting enough. Look for local hero’s, someone well know or that has recently done something news worthy.

2) Get published on a blog:
We have all ready talked about how important it is to be on social media. Getting published on someone else’s blog takes your social media presence one step further. Word of mouth is one of the best forms of marketing because it’s free and it spreads like wild fire. This also relates to our first tip, if you can convenience a popular blogger that writes about things related to your target market it’s a form of an endorsement.

3) Tracking:
You need to make sure that the money you are spending is being used in the right places. The best way to do this is tracking what you are doing and seeing if it’s working. There are tons of tools out there you can use to track the analytics of your marketing efforts and most of them are free. Google analytics is one of the best and most widely used but there are other sites out there like Cliky and Pikiw if you prefer to try something else. If you see that one of your marketing channels is not delivering any results maybe its not best to be spending your money there. Instead look at the channels that are attracting the most business and focus your money and attention there.



These are just a few ides to get you started and get you thinking about how to market on a budget. Takes these ideas and run with them, but don’t forget you get what you put in. No marketing plan is free don’t cut to many corners, it might result in a loss of students.