7 Low-Cost Marketing Tools

Written By Ashley McGee

2021

It’s no secret small- and medium-sized businesses often require both the owner and employees to wear multiple hats in order to create value and serve their customers. You’ve likely also considered outsourcing different areas, but in reality, it’s not always possible.

Marketing is one area that often isn’t given the adequate time or resources needed to be successful. Nearly 49% of small-business owners handle marketing for their business on their own.1 However, almost half of small businesses spend less than two hours per week on marketing efforts.2

In the increasingly competitive shooting industry, consistent and effective marketing is essential to growth and longevity. Thankfully, there are some great low-cost marketing tools to help grow your store or range.

1. Content Management System (CMS)

If you don’t have a website or your website hasn’t been updated in the last 3–5 years, this is the first place you should start. A website works as a 24/7 salesperson so it’s an area worth investing in.

WordPress is a great place to start. The platform now powers 39.5% of all websites in 2021,3 up from powering 35% of sites in 2020. Counting only sites with a content management system (CMS), WordPress has a market share of 64.1%.

There’s a reason for its popularity. WordPress is extremely customizable, versatile, scalable and reliable. Plus, it’s SEO-friendly, easy to integrate with other tools and simple to manage.

WordPress itself is free, but you will need to pay for ongoing website hosting and may consider purchasing a custom website theme.

For someone like Hillary Dube, owner of HNR Gun Works in Inverness, Fla., who said, “Blogging is the best affordable tool I use to market the store, firearms training and gunsmithing,” an easy-to-manage content management system is vital.

2. Email Marketing

You can’t expect every person who visits your website or store will make a purchase, especially if it’s their first time. But, to grow your business, it’s important to find a way to turn them into leads you can continue to nurture.

A simple way to do this is by building an email list.

“Email blasts are the most cost-effective marketing tool we use,” said Ben Romanoff of Ace Sporting Goods in Washington, Pa. “Customers are able to sign up online or in our store. We don’t inundate them with multiple emails but will send once a week, on average.”

Ace Sporting Goods uses Mailchimp, which makes it easy to evaluate the email open rate and other statistics in order to determine whether a campaign was successful or not.

“We typically see an instant response to the items we choose to highlight,” Romanoff added.

Mailchimp offers a free plan for up to 2,000 email contacts, but the standard plan offers additional features including data-driven optimization, behavioral targeting and custom templates for up to 100,000 contacts for just $14.99 per month.

Other popular email marketing platforms for small businesses include Constant Contact ActiveCampaign, HubSpot and MailerLite.
We suggest comparing their features and pricing to find the best fit for your business and goals.

3. Google My Business

Businesses often overlook the importance of optimizing and updating their Google My Business listing. But considering nine out of ten internet users who search for information online do so through Google, it seems like a no-brainer to use this free feature.

Google My Business is the information on the right side of the page when you search for a business. It includes vital information about a company including its hours of operation, address, telephone number and website. It’s also where users can leave reviews and ask questions.

If you haven’t already claimed your business listing, go to Google.com/Business. Make sure you fill in as much information as possible, including uploading interior and exterior photos of your business.

“Email blasts are the most cost-effective marketing tool we use.”

Ben Romanoff, General Manager Ace Sporting Goods, Washington, Pa.

If you change your business hours for any reason, remember to update them on Google My Business. We also suggest using the post feature to share company updates. If you have a blog on your website, sharing a brief snippet and link to read more is a simple way to make sure your listing is frequently updated.

4. Graphic Design

Key components of an effective marketing strategy include branding and advertising. Not every store or range has someone on their staff with graphic design experience or the resources to hire someone who does.

Canva is an easy-to-use design platform with thousands of customizable pre-sized templates.

“I use Canva a lot to make everything from professional-looking flyers, certificates, social media posts and even tags for our firearm displays,” said Kelsey Scribner of Wyoming Gun Company in Casper, Wyo. “They have a free version, which we use, or you can pay a small annual fee for unlimited access.”

The team at Wyoming Gun Company uses Canva to make flyers, certificates, social media posts
and even tags for firearm displays.

Canva Pro costs $12.99 per month, or a discounted subscription rate is $119.99 per year. Its most beneficial features include access to 420,000+ templates, 75+ million premium stock photos, videos, audio and graphics, 100 GB of cloud storage and the ability to directly schedule social media posts to seven platforms.

The Pro version also allows users to create a brand kit with company logos and colors so branded designs can be created quickly with just a click.

Canva is no replacement for a professional graphic designer, but it will help you create more polished and professional marketing materials if you don’t have access to one.

Before getting started, you may consider working with a designer or branding expert to develop a style guide you or your employees can refer to when creating designs in Canva. Fiverr is a marketplace to find a freelancer for one-off projects.

5. Photo Editing

If you just need a tool to help with photo editing, Baron Boyette of Gordy & Sons Outfitters in Houston recommends the free version of Pixlr.

“It’s valuable to do quick and easy resizing for social media images, and has an easy-to-use interface for fonts as well,” he said.

Another great option is the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom smartphone app. For $4.99/month, you get access to a pared-down version of Photoshop specifically for basic photo editing and image management.

6. Video Editing

Sixty-eight percent of consumers prefer watching a video to reading about a product. In 2021, when attention spans are shorter than ever before, video is no longer an optional part of an effective marketing strategy.

Thankfully, you don’t necessarily need professionally produced videos to get started as long as you have quality equipment. At a minimum, we suggest a quality camera (or an iPhone), a tripod with a ring light and a lavalier microphone.
Video editing software can often be expensive or have a steep learning curve.

Jake Gaden of Wilshire Gun in Oklahoma City suggests Adobe Creative Suite, which comes with Adobe Premiere Pro for video production and editing.

“Having the capability to edit and produce videos, is extremely valuable. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and videos are millions of pictures,” he said. “The ability to showcase how things really work, and having the option to see someone manipulate a product or break down a service is a difficult asset to match.”

Adobe Premiere Pro allows users to edit footage on mobile or desktop and allows graphics, effects, transitions and high-quality audio.

A full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription costs $52.99/month and includes access to all 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps, or you can get Premiere Pro for $20.99/month.

The InShot app is an affordable alternative, especially if you’re mostly editing short-form videos for social media. It will run you $3.99/month or $14.99/year once the free trial expires.

7. Social Media Scheduling

With so many options now on the market, you’ve likely heard of at least one social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. But with their rise in popularity, the social media platforms themselves have been building out their own internal scheduling functionality to keep you from spending money on third-party systems.

And since social media is so restrictive when it comes to what businesses in the shooting industry can and can’t do, why spend more money in this area than you have to?

Facebook Creator Studio allows users to create, schedule and edit both Facebook and Instagram posts. Recently, the platform announced the ability to also schedule Stories — short little clips at the top that disappear after 24 hours.

Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok all allow you to schedule posts as well.

A single scheduler may save you time by allowing you to schedule multiple platforms from a single portal, but it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth the cost of another monthly or annual subscription fee.

Footnotes:
1. https://bit.ly/3nOuXb5
2. https://bit.ly/3f0I597
3. https://bit.ly/33lusM2

Editor’s Note: There’s nothing worse than spending a long time designing a flyer or webpage and realizing its riddled with errors — see the online version of this article for an eighth low-cost tip.

8. Grammarly (Online Extra!)

If there’s one tool to help you with every single aspect of marketing mentioned above, it’s Grammarly. Grammarly is a free online writing assistant; it scans your text for common spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Even its free version is more comprehensive than the built-in spellcheck feature in Microsoft.

Plus, there’s a browser plug-in and smartphone app that will check everything you write in real-time from emails and blog posts to social media captions and video scripts.

There’s nothing worse than spending a long time designing a sales flyer or writing a blog or web page only to realize after you hit print or publish it’s riddled with errors.

Key Takeaways

As a small business owner or manager, it’s important to understand one of the trade-offs of people wearing “multiple hats” is it prevents the person from being able to focus on their primary job function. It also hinders their ability to tap into their personal core competency. Not to mention, not everyone is an expert in the ancillary roles they’re often expected to fulfill which can lead to decreases in the company’s productivity and efficiency as a whole.

But the reality is sometimes wearing multiple hats is unavoidable. If you don’t have the resources to hire a full-time marketing person or team, or outsource to an experienced marketing agency, the low- and no-cost marketing tools in this article will help you save time and money while also improving the overall quality of your marketing efforts.

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