What is the cheapest way to get customers?

Asking the customers you already have. A referral from somebody who has paid you converts at a multiple of anything cold, costs nothing, and almost nobody does it systematically.

How much should a small business spend on marketing?

The honest answer for a business with no customers is: as close to nothing as possible until something works. Spending is how you scale a thing that converts, not how you find out whether it converts.

Does social media work for small businesses?

For some — food, trades with visible before-and-afters, anything local and visual. For others it is a time sink with no path to a sale. The test is whether your buyers are already there asking questions you could answer.

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Getting customers9 min read

Marketing a business with no budget: what actually works

By MarketWar OS · 10 August 2026

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Everything here costs time rather than money, and they are in order of what usually returns most first. If you only do the first three you will be ahead of most of your competitors.

1. Ask the customers you already have

Every completed job, every time: are they happy, and do they know anybody else with the same problem. A referral converts at several times the rate of anything cold and costs nothing.

Almost nobody does this systematically. It is the highest-return activity available to a small business and it feels awkward for about two weeks.

2. Claim and fill your Google Business Profile

Free, and for anything local it outranks your website in the results that matter. Every field, real photographs, current hours. Then ask every customer for a review, every time, without gating or filtering.

3. Fix what is broken on the site you have

Not a rebuild. The title tag, the HTTPS warning, the phone number that is a picture, the form with nine fields. These are hours of work, not thousands of pounds, and they act on all the traffic you already have. Our free audit will tell you which apply to your page in about fifteen seconds.

4. Write one real page about one real thing

The service you actually want more of, in the town you actually cover, priced honestly, written by whoever does the work. Not a blog. One page that answers what somebody would ask on the phone.

5. Answer questions where your buyers already ask them

Local Facebook groups, trade forums, the community pages for your town. Answer properly, without pitching. This is slow, it works, and it is free.

6. Message ten people you can name

Not a campaign. Ten businesses or people you could describe to a friend, one message each, from your own phone or inbox. Most will say nothing. One or two will not, and that is a week's work turned into a conversation.

7. Photograph your work

Before and after, on a phone, badly lit, real. For trades this outperforms any copywriting you could buy, and it costs the two minutes before you pack the van.

8. Partner with somebody adjacent

The electrician who needs a plasterer. The accountant who needs a bookkeeper. One conversation can produce a referral stream that costs nothing forever.

9. Only then, content and social at volume

This is where most advice starts and it is where you should finish. It compounds, slowly, and it is a poor use of your only resource when you have no customers yet.

The three to be careful of

Paid ads before you convert. Sending paid traffic to a page that does not convert is buying a more expensive version of the same nothing.

A rebuild. The most expensive way to test a hypothesis you have not written down.

An agency retainer, this month. There is a case for one later. Here is what you are actually buying, and which parts of it you can do yourself.

And when something works

Do more of exactly that before you change anything. The instinct after one success is to redesign everything around it; the correct move is to run it again, twice, and see whether it was real.

If people are arriving and not getting in touch, the six causes are here. If nobody is arriving at all, start with this one.