Lists of cheap marketing ideas are usually long and undifferentiated, which is unhelpful when the real constraint is that you have about three hours a week. What follows is ordered by what returns most per hour for a typical local business, and it says plainly which popular suggestions are not worth your time.
Ask every customer for a review
This returns more per hour than anything else on the list. Reviews influence whether you appear in local results and whether anyone chooses you once you do, and the cost is a sentence at the end of a job plus a link. Most businesses ask occasionally and inconsistently, which is why a competitor with steadier reviews takes work they could have had.
Make it a habit rather than a campaign. The person who did the work asks, at the moment it finishes, with a link on a phone. Anything more elaborate than that reduces how often it actually happens.
Follow up the enquiries you already had
Every business has a list of people who enquired and were never called back, or were called once and not again. That list is the cheapest work available, it requires no marketing at all, and it is consistently ignored in favour of finding new people.
Before any of this, ring the enquiries from the last three months that never went anywhere. It costs nothing and it usually produces more work than the campaign the owner came in asking about.
Ryan Cole, Founder, Presseo
Partner with businesses that share your customer
An electrician and a kitchen fitter want the same household at different moments. A reciprocal referral arrangement with two or three non-competing trades costs nothing and produces work that arrives pre-trusted, which converts far better than a cold enquiry.
Keep it concrete: agree what a referral looks like, how it is passed and whether anything is owed. Vague goodwill arrangements fade within a month.
What is usually not worth your three hours
- Posting daily on social platforms where your customers do not look for your trade.
- Printed leaflets across a wide area with no way to tell what worked.
- Paid directory listings that promise leads and provide a page nobody visits.
- Rewriting your logo and brand colours while the phone number is hard to find.
Social media is worth qualifying rather than dismissing. For trades with a visual result and a local audience it can work well; for many service businesses it absorbs hours and returns very little compared with the items above.
Do one thing consistently
The most common failure is attempting all of it for three weeks and then none of it. Pick the top item, do it every week for three months, and add the next one only once the first is genuinely a habit. Our local SEO index covers what to do once the free work is exhausted.
Photograph your work properly
For any trade with a visible result, photographs of finished jobs are the most persuasive asset available and they cost nothing beyond the habit. Before and after pairs are particularly effective because they show the problem you solve rather than the service you sell, and prospective customers recognise their own situation in the before picture.
Take them on the phone you already carry, in daylight, from the same angle each time. Consistency matters more than photographic quality, and a folder of two hundred real jobs is worth more than any stock imagery a designer could supply.
Answer the question everyone asks before they call
Every trade has a question customers want answered before they will pick up the phone, and it is usually about price or about how long something takes. Businesses avoid answering it publicly in case it loses enquiries, and the effect is the opposite: the people who would have been put off simply do not call, and the ones who do call are better qualified.
A rough range with an honest explanation of what moves it is enough. It costs nothing to publish and it removes the most common reason somebody chooses a competitor who was willing to say.
Short on budget rather than ideas?
We will tell you which of these are worth your time in your trade and area, and which would produce nothing.
