Here’s the great irony of the end of the year. This is when your business needs the most money, but has the least. Your marketing budget for this year was spent months ago, and it seems like every other company out there is ramping up their advertising efforts to take advantage of pre-Christmas spending. If you’re looking to get beginning-of-the-year success with an end-of-the-year budget, here are some great tips for you.

Leverage existing client networks.

What’s that statistic again? It costs eight gazillion times more money to get a new client than to retain an existing one? This fact is consistently underutilized in the small business community. Marketing to your existing clients is essentially a free activity. To use this tactic, you can do anything from sending a quick personal e-mail, asking about their daughter’s ballet recital, to sending out a mass mailing asking if anyone needs anything, to creating a special year-end discount for existing customers only.

Offering one-time discounts to existing clients is a good alternative to giving across the board discounts. When a new client sees “25% off everything for the month of November”, they come to expect that price. Existing clients have already accepted your base price, and will be more willing to pay it again in the future.

Use old customers to get new customers.

The benefits of business by referral cannot be understated. The problem is, many small business don’t think to ask for leads. They think it’s pushy or rude or lazy. The reality is that if someone has thought your business was good enough to buy from, they’ll probably think it’s good enough for their friends, too.

You could offer 10% off their next purchase for each lead they give you. You could offer them 50% off if a lead turns into a sale. While you’re handing out discounts, tell them that whoever they refer will get a discount as well. This leads to a lot of price dropping in the short term but will create a lot of client loyalty in the long term.

Keep in mind, five new sales for you at 90% of their normal retail value gives you a lot more money than no new sales at 100%.

Try public relations instead of marketing.

A good PR campaign can cost you virtually nothing, but gain you tons of exposure and credibility. The key to public relations is giving value to your audience - real, honest value. Sending out a press release saying that you’re giving a discount is not value. Sending out a press release saying that you’ll be donating all of your profits from a certain day to a homeless shelter is.

Go out and buy a newspaper and read it cover to cover. What did you remember? What made you say, “Wow, that’s really great”? Those are the kind of things you’re looking to replicate. Even small-scale media coverage can do amazing things for your business.

If you can’t write a good press release on your own, hire someone else to do it for you. There are plenty of public relations firms and freelancers that will do a great job for far less than any kind of traditional marketing would cost.

Whatever method you choose, and you should probably choose more than one, keep in mind that anything is better than nothing. Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As usual, he was right. Get ready to shake things up a bit and end your year with a business bang.

This was a guest post by Naomi Dunford (pictured above) who writes IttyBiz, a blog for people who work from home or who are thinking about it. Right now, they’re running four weeks of articles about the big issues surrounding freelancing and running your own business - managing your time, making more money, marketing yourself, and the psychology of working from home.

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