You know it’s going to take a marketing push to meet your sales goals this year. But your budget is tight and you’ll need to use your imagination to make it. Where to start?

For many business owners, marketing doesn’t come naturally. They lurch from one tactic to another without a clear idea of whether the efforts are going to pay off in higher sales.

If that description sounds familiar, here are some time-tested, low-cost techniques to improve your marketing and help you reach your goals.

1. Conduct a survey

It’s critical to create a marketing plan before moving on to tactics. And the first step in developing a marketing plan is to understand who your target customers are and what they want from your company.

A good way to gain a better understanding of your customers is to conduct a survey about your products or services. If you can’t afford to hire a research company, do it yourself by creating a short questionnaire and recruiting existing and prospective customers to participate.

2. Pamper your existing customers

It’s typically five times as expensive to make a sale to a new customer as it is to an existing one. So make sure you’re not neglecting the people who already know and trust you.

Consider, for example, taking your best customers out to dinner or golf and using the opportunity to ask them about how to improve your business. You could also personally write to your top 10 customers to thank them and tell them they’re part of your new loyalty program or invite them to sneak preview your latest product.

3. Commit to online marketing

The Internet provides you with an inexpensive 24-hour virtual storefront. You can build relationships with prospective customers by offering them high-quality content on your site such as blogs, how-to articles, videos and a newsletter.

You can also extend your reach by using social media. One word of caution, however: If you’re not willing to devote six to eight hours a week of an employee’s time, you’re better off going with a simple, well-designed website.

4. Use all your real estate

Your building and surrounding land or sidewalk are great places to put up signs and banners. And don’t forget to use your vehicles as moving billboards. But remember: Your images and messages should focus on what you’re selling, not your company’s name.

5. Work at public relations

A media story about your company is generally much more valuable than an advertisement because of the credibility it confers on your business. But in this era of media cutbacks, it’s harder than ever to attract journalists’ attention. Keep in mind that they’re looking for a compelling story to tell. So help them by letting them know about your innovative product, unusual customer contact or high-stakes gamble that paid off. And keep at it—building relationships with the media will pay off.

6. Turn employees into ambassadors

Your employees are part of the community and have all sorts of contacts that could help you. How about inviting employees and their extended families to a fun event at your business? You may find you get new word-of-mouth business or hear about a potential new business partner. At the very least, your team will come back to work on Monday feeling energized.

7. Give back

By sponsoring a hockey team or participating in a charity drive with a cheque and a collection jar in your lunchroom or by the cash register, you’re not only doing your part for the community but also generating goodwill with customers and prospects.

Follow these tips to gain additional insights about your customers

Are your customers satisfied with your products or services? Do you know what they like about your business? More importantly, do you know how you could improve what you do?

Customer surveys can provide answers to these questions as well as unique insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Unfortunately, a lot of smaller businesses think they can’t do a customer survey properly.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are a lot of online survey tools—inexpensive and sometimes even free—that make customer surveys doable for all businesses, with templates, sample questions and more.

Here are a few tips for business owners who want to get started with customer surveys or for those who want to improve what they are already doing.

1. Set clear objectives

To conduct a successful customer survey, you have to know from the get-go what kind of information you want to collect.

Start by talking to your employees, especially anyone who works directly with customers. They’ll have good insights into the kinds of people you serve, what they need or expect, and if they’ve noted any “early warning signs” of dissatisfaction that you should know about.

For example, if sales are declining in a certain area of your business, your survey could help you find out why that is. You can build your survey to see if something has changed for your customers that makes your product or service less relevant—maybe it’s a feature they no longer need or a new competitor with a better offer.

Consider having a set of core questions you ask every time you conduct a survey, with other questions that can be changed annually or semi-annually depending on specific things you want to find out.

2. Ask about overall satisfaction, then get to the details

Most customer surveys start by asking about overall satisfaction and then drill down to get to the details.

You want to get a spontaneous response off the top. Do they like you or don’t they? If you start with a lot of detailed questions, people lose that spontaneity. And if you leave questions about overall satisfaction to the end, when people just want to be done with the survey, you probably won’t get the rating you deserve.

Spontaneous responses are highly valuable because they tell you what people really think about your company.

3. Keep it short and simple

Write your survey using clear, simple words people will understand. People multitask when completing online or telephone surveys and are easily distracted. You want to make it easy for them to follow along and answer accurately.

It’s also critical to keep your survey short—it should take no longer than seven minutes to complete. Anything beyond seven minutes and you’ll see a lot of people quitting the survey before they finish.

4. Limit the number of open-ended questions

An open-ended question is any question that requires the respondent to fill in a box with free form text. An example might be, “What do you most want from your shopping experience?”

Research shows that people tend to write everything they have to say in response to the first open-ended question in a survey. Asking many open-ended questions could give you many blank fields or repetitive answers.

Open-ended questions often give you the nuggets, the actionable things you want to work on immediately. You may only need one or two to get that gold from customers.

5. Contact different customers each time

Surveys can be done on a regular basis, even once a week, but it is important not to survey any one customer more than once or twice a year. Otherwise, they get tired and possibly annoyed.

Research shows that if you survey the same customers too often, you start to get higher quit rates, as well as clients who ask to be removed from your survey list, and these are lost forever.

Look beyond your customer base

Customer surveys are just one type of market research that specifically targets your existing clientele.

Broader market research is normally done when moving into a new market or launching a new product. In those cases, you are surveying a sample of people from your target market, and only some of them may have done business with you before.

This broader type of customer survey can be expensive and often requires expert help to objectively study what you need to know.