Marketing on a shoestring is pretty much a way of life for us small business owners. This skill is becoming increasingly important because of what’s been going on with the economy.

Here’s a short list of marketing and promotional tactics that are usually inexpensive to implement and, when done right, can deliver a huge return to your business.

Market to your “house list”

Your “house list” is simply your mailing (or email) list of current customers, past customers, and prospects. There are two things that make this such a high return marketing method. First, you can reach these people for almost no cost (it is actually free if you’re using email). Second, these are people who have either already done business with you or volunteered their contact information, making them much more likely to be receptive to your offers than the market in general.

Create Buzz

With a little sweat equity, you can sow the seeds of positive buzz in your market pretty easily. Buzz is simply word-of-mouth – people talking about you. To make this happen, get your product or service in front of influencers. Influencers are people in a position influence the decisions of others. Just remember that to be effective, buzz has to be authentic, so any obviously self-serving promotional attempts will almost certainly fail, and may even do more harm than good.

An easy way to do this is to find the influencers among your customers or in your market. These are the people who are constantly dispensing advice about anything and everything to their friends. Talk to them. Sell them on how wonderful your product or service is. Get your product in their hands if they don’t already have it.

A little more difficult, but with a potentially much larger payoff, is to get your product or service in the hands of bloggers or columnists who, assuming they liked it, would write about their experience.

Get referrals

Closely related to buzz are referrals. The difference is that the referral is a more direct sales pitch, while buzz is more general word-of-mouth exposure. Encourage your customers to refer their friends and colleagues. Get more details about how to do this in “How to turn your customers into salespeople.”

Be careful here, there is a thin line between encouraging referral business and buying it. Once you cross that line, the referrals you get will be motivated more by what’s in it for the person making the referral and less about a genuine recommendation of your product or service.

There you have a quick overview of three low cost/no-cost ways to market your business. No matter what you decide to do, always test and measure. That is the only way you will ever know what works and what doesn’t.