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Firstly, make your website as effective and professional as your budget allows. Use a recommended local web designer who knows about search engine optimisation. Make sure you keep your website simple and clear and include PDFs of key pages, so that they can double up as marketing collateral and allow you to save on printing costs. Link your website to a daily blog that has chatty topical comment. Have a section on the website that you can easily update yourself, latest news etc, and do this often - or just link this section to your blog and update your blog often. If you are reading this blog, that's proof of the pudding!
Concentrate on your key words and phrases for the search engines and do searches on what your customers would use if looking with your service to see how easy you are to find. All of this should result in a user and search engine friendly website - a great basis for any budget marketing and PR campaign.
Having made the website as user friendly and as search engine visible as possible, offer free industry advice. For example, we offer free PR Fact Sheets. We get regularly requests for these and they lead to interest in our company and to signing new customers. We are happy to share ideas here for marketing and PR on a shoe string :-) www.chazb.com
Other cost effective PR and Marketing approaches to think about could be to link up with suppliers and customers when planning any seminars, events etc so as to share the cost, and to work with industry bodies and local Chamber of Commerce to maximise low cost marketing opportunities.
I will be talking on Wednesday 13th May at the ‘Grow your own Business’ exhibition at Guildford Spectrum, so just come around and we can have a chat how PR can help your business.