How should a new company advertise if it has a limited budget?

Limited budget marketing, that’s how I started out and you learn really quickly to get creative. First step it to analyze your market, your product, and your customers. How do other companies get to these folks, what works and what doesn’t, do a full profile of your ideal customer. From that you should be able to determine what works for them and your product and what doesn’t. The trick to low budget marketing is to leverage money someone else is spending, most segments have someone that has money and also has ideal events that make your company’s offering more topical. You want to design a campaign that leverages both existing events and existing budgets.

In the new world of social networking you also want to determine who your influencers are and engage them so they talk about your product (first to you then publically). Spend some time with some of them and get to know what they hot buttons are, make them a part of the effort and a member of your team.

In the end though, low budget marketing, is about gaming the system and the first step is to analyze the system you are gaming. In this case the dynamics that surround people that buy the products you are marketing. Be aware though that in a low budget world the product does have to carry a lot of weight and while you can fool folks once, if the product doesn’t step up, no amount of creativity is going to make up for a crappy product.

What are you repairing? My father decided to start a small business in his retirement repairing sewing machines. By giving a little face time at local sewing clubs, machine sales stores, fabric stores, etc. he soon had more work than he could climb out from under! With all the new-tech methodology, don't neglect the methods that have survived for centuries. :)

Together, let's put the fun back into life!
Belldon Colme
belldoncolme@gmail.com

Belldon gave a great suggestion. I would add a couple of ideas. Write articles about the product you are repairing. Perhaps how to care for them or get the most our of them and have them placed in newsletters or magazines your potential customers reads. Most newsletters and mags are hungry for solid content. DO NOT sell your services in the article. Just make sure your contact info is at the bottom.
Also, treat your customers like royalty or beloved family members. Get your customers to advertise you with great word of mouth. That is the best and most effective advertising there is. When you get a website, have a section with testimonials. If you can get them on video even better.
Good luck.

I found out that analyzing other strategies from other companies can be very very misleading. For these kind of services i strongly recommend mister's Belldon's approach and also, a strategy that i personally applied, try to appeal to clients with articles and campaigns that are promoting interesting facts about your domain or correct and incorrect practice of your service.

Low hanging fruit. Start with people you know. Send an email or letter out to let them know you're opening your doors soon and would like them to know about it. Include: if THEY know anyone they can recommend to you. Start offline to build your credibility fast and get clients in the door quickly.

@SandraBaptist (on Twitter)

I have had good success with a small known circle mass communication as Sandra suggested. I used facebook, linkedin and emails. It became viral!

My company is far from new, but Craig's List continues to be a source of leads. Granted, we only tend to get around 1-2 leads per month, but that's easily worth the cost of admission: no money and between 5 and 30 seconds to repost the ad each time, depending on whether the system allows you to use the one-click "renew" function on a given day. Depending on what you're repairing, Craig's List might be well worth your minimal effort!