5 Inexpensive Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses
Small businesses can build effective marketing strategies with inexpensive marketing ideas and tactics that build brand awareness and achieve marketing objectives. Marketing is possible on a small budget or, in fact, no budget as you can adopt marketing strategies and ideas that will reach and engage your target audience.
Marketing is a great way to improve your bottom line, increase sales, and introduce new customers to your business. Every small business can implement marketing, and with the right strategies and marketing plan, your business can expose its brand identity and build stable relationships. Ensure you are following the proper steps to jump-start your marketing and exceed your expectations by commencing some of the following inexpensive marketing ideas for your small business.
1. Social Media Video Content
As we live in a highly digital-savvy world, all businesses should have active social media accounts. Social media has the power to develop meaningful relationships and attract new customers with engaging regular content, and best of all, it’s free. Social media, in particular, video content, is an inexpensive marketing idea to connect and reach a vast majority of users quickly.
By using video content, your small business can catch the attention of your target audience with creative and exciting topics that can be informative. Your business can use gifs or short ‘how to’ and demonstration videos to educate the audience as to why they should purchase your product/service.
2. Hashtag & Tag On Social Media
Another marketing idea that embraces the digital age and is completely free is to optimize your social media posts and content with hashtags and tags. Your small business can tag particular followers, companies, partners, and even employees on social media to immediately increase the post reach and attract attention. By tagging other companies and influencers affiliated with your brand, you can enhance brand awareness and reach a larger audience.
Additionally, you can incorporate hashtags in your captions to reach accounts that follow a specific hashtag. Ensure that you use relevant hashtags to your business and products/services to target your desired audience and reach stakeholders interested in your industry.
3. Build LinkedIn Connections
Although LinkedIn may be less exciting than platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, it is an essential tool to use in your marketing strategy and to reach your business objectives. LinkedIn allows you to form strong connections with potential customers and network within your industry.
LinkedIn ensures your brand can be recognized by other professionals in your field and boost sales through connections and positive word of mouth. LinkedIn additionally provides you with the ability to form an alliance with other professionals and help your small business build creditability. It’s imperative to interact with professionals in your industry and, importantly your customers on LinkedIn. You can do this by posting regularly or through direct messages about your workplace, services/products, company news, and updates.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great inexpensive idea that markets directly to existing customers and can improve your bottom line. Your customers are aware of your brand, have purchased your products/services, and therefore you have the opportunity to turn them into repeat customers. Email marketing is used to send a direct message to customers and is one of the most reliable ways to achieve a strong return on your marketing investment.
Reaching out to existing clients can streamline sales while creating a strong brand connection with customers. They can keep up to date on company news, gain access to exclusive deals, and view your business benefits. Each email marketing campaign allows your small business to maintain a strong relationship and communication with customers while enhancing website trafic. Often customers enjoy maintaining a strong brand connection, and effective email marketing can help you achieve this.
5. Create Blog Content to Boost SEO
It’s vital that you promote your small business in a way that drives traffic to your website and generates leads. This can be done through blog posts on your website and SEO. Your small business should create a blog page on your website if you already have one or update your existing one with regular blog posts each week. Blogs posts are the ultimate marketing tactic that enables your business to write about your product/service insights and benefits, industry news, company updates, client case studies and your workplace. It’s critical to remember that blog content should be engaging, creative, and diverse with specific hyperlinks and subheadings to hook the readers and effectively reach your desired audienc.
These five inexpensive marketing strategies when performed consistently will help your small business boost sales, increase brand awareness and achieve marketing and business objectives. You can immediately develop a strong brand identity by utilizing social media and the other marketing ideas listed above while connecting with customers and encouraging two-way communication.
If your small business requires a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes more inexpensive marketing ideas and an in-depth analysis of your brand and competitors, contact the team at Robotic Marketer today to learn more.
Image: Shutterstock 1157182405
Which Marketing Strategy is Right for my Business?
The purpose of marketing is to link your company’s value to the appropriate consumer base. It’s a basic concept with a million distinct strategies involved. Knowing which marketing approaches are viable and which are a waste of time can help reduce costs, increase awareness, and drive consumer engagement. Therefore, understanding which marketing strategies are best suited to your business, whilst challenging, is important in the long term.Read more
How To Develop An Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta
These days, it’s harder than ever for businesses to attract the attention of their audience. No matter how good the products or services are, there will always be hefty competition gunning for your customers. While it might be easy to start some sort of bidding war between you and your competition, it’s more effective to begin building a relationship with your audience to establish a sense of trust and thought leadership. You can do this with an effective content marketing strategy. A content strategy utilizes the content that your organization develops to achieve any particular business goals that you have in place, whether it’s driving brand awareness and engagement or pushing a new product. Below, we discuss how to develop an effective content marketing strategy to achieve your business goals.
Define Your Goal
First thing’s first, you need to define exactly why you will be developing content for your business. Why do you want to produce content? What will you hope to accomplish? What types of content will you use to achieve our goals? By answering a lot of these why questions, you will begin to define and establish a goal for your content marketing strategy.
Conduct Persona Research
After defining what you hope to accomplish with your content marketing strategy, you will need to clearly define your content’s target audience – the buyer persona. The buyer persona will be a fictionalized ideal of your best customer. When you know who you are writing to, it will make it much easier to conceptualize topics and put them in terms that your audience will understand.
Decide What Content You Will Create
As important as it is to understand who you are creating content for, it’s also important to decide what type of content you are hoping to create. Different pieces of content will accomplish different things, so you need to understand how each works. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most popular types of content:
- Blogs – A tried and true method of informing and educating your audience, the blog is as traditional as it gets in the digital era. However, it’s important to understand how effective blogs can be for lead generation and brand recognition for your organization.
- Videos – With the aid of technology, video production has never been more accessible or more cost-effective. Video is a great tool for simplifying complex topics and driving engagement and brand awareness.
- E-Books – As a long-form content piece, e-books are a great way to get very specific about different aspects of your organization. E-books are great for services, products,
- White Papers – When it comes to generating content about your industry as a whole, white papers are a great resource for your audience. Use statistics and pull quotes to support your copy.
- Email Campaigns – Email campaigns allow you to drive your audience directly to the website. You can keep your audience informed on the latest advances in your industry as well as any new innovations from your company.
Publish and Manage Content
Finally, you need to set up a publishing cadence for all of your content. Blogs are a weekly contribution, so it’s important to keep to the cadence that you set up. As for any other pieces of content, trial your pieces with A/B testing to figure out what works best. At the end of the day, finding a process that fits your business is more important than maintaining some sort of industry-wide consistency.
How Marketing Eye Can Help
Marketing Eye is a results-driven marketing agency that specializes in elevating the marketing efforts of small to medium-sized businesses. We work with you to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges your business faces and develop a marketing strategy that meets your needs. Our marketing experts are uniquely equipped to design an effective content strategy that achieves the goals of your organization. Contact Marketing Eye today to learn how we can help you.
Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta
The Top Marketing Strategies Deployed By B2B Content Marketers
There are a lot of different forms of marketing these days, you could be forgiven for losing track of which is which.
This article focuses on how your business can effectively execute B2B or business-to-business content marketing; what it is, and why it is an important area for your business to have efficient marketing strategies in place.
What is B2B marketing
B2B marketing can be a challenging area to excel in, with so many businesses competing for the same goals, partnerships and customers.
Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations, as opposed to B2C marketing that focuses on marketing to consumers.
Ultimately, B2B marketing content is generally more informational and straightforward than B2C, as corporate decision-makers are more concerned with how these business decisions will affect their ROI, finances and future growth.
The aim is to expand your business’ audience whilst developing brand affinity and driving sales by appealing to other businesses who have a need for your product or service.
There are many different types of B2B marketing that your business can use, the majority of which are similar to B2C marketing tactics, only the way you create your content is very different.
The main types and channels are:
- Blogs
- Updating blogs regularly can create more traffic for your website and keep your audience interested, as long as the topics and forms of blogs you create stay relevant and shareable.
- Social Media
- There are so many social media channels out there for you to reach your audience. B2B marketing generally has a LinkedIn focus, but there is no reason you cannot utilize other platforms to research and engage with your customers as much as possible.
- Email
- Many businesses utilize email marketing for lead generation and relationship management. This tactic keeps your brand top-of-mind while also enhancing the lead nurturing process; bringing efficiency, meaning to content and actionable results.
- Videos
- You can upload and share videos using all of the above formats. This medium is a great way to engage your audience and present the features of your business in an in-depth fashion.
- SEO
- By ensuring your site contains the right keywords for your audience, you will be able to rise up in the search engine ranks and create higher website traffic.
As long as your content produced in these formats is aimed at enticing businesses rather than appealing to your usual customers, these channels and techniques can be a great way of promoting your brand to other businesses.
The best approaches for creating a B2B marketing strategy
With so many approaches to B2B marketing available today, it can be difficult to decipher which is the best of the lot.
But there is no one size fits all way of tackling this problem, there are many different ways your business can utilize B2B marketing to attract other organizations to your services.
So, we are going to outline a few different approaches adopted by the best that you can tailor to the needs and functions of your business.
Approach 1
Develop an encompassing vision for your strategy and define your market:
- Outline specific and achievable business goals.
- Create a B2B marketing strategy around these goals, so that your primary focus is on ticking them off.
- Constantly check that your audience is engaged and that sales and marketing are on the same track.
- Can you actually measure the results of each of your goals?
- Your audience should be much narrower than that of B2C businesses; conduct research to identify your ideal customers.
Identify possible channel types to run your campaigns:
- Decide how you will reach your target audience and ensure you know features about your ideal customers.
- Understand how your audience is spending time online, which social media channels they use the most and how you can offer them products and services that your competitors cannot.
- Ensure your campaigns advertise the right message; include calls to action and sophisticated language, as the businesses you are appealing to will have a prior understanding of your product or service when it comes to B2B marketing.
Measure results, make adjustments, and go again:
- Understand why some content works better than others so that you can make future investments in your strategy wisely.
- The audience is key; use analytics tools to determine where consumers are engaging the most, what channels they are using and focus on these areas in the future.
Approach 2
Identify your ideal audience
- Develop market segments and try to create smaller groups of potential consumers so you can better identify what each business will be able to get out of your organization.
- Utilize tools such as Google Analytics to find out more about your target customers in terms of demographic information and their interests that may help you further narrow down your potential customer base.
Develop new content ideas continuously
- Once you have identified your audience, you need to provide them with topics and content as consistently as possible, by observing what your audience is talking about on social media.
- There are a number of tools available developed specifically for B2B marketers that you can use to analyze and track keyword searches for you.
- Use what you already know about your audience to anticipate what they want to read and learn about, your content, especially for B2B marketing, needs to provide an obvious benefit to your audience, otherwise, they will have no need to be engaged with you.
Test and promote your B2B content
- LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to test with your audience what they want to read and learn about by creating polls and asking questions and generating conversations.
- By this time, you should have a much clearer idea of what your audience and other businesses are looking for from your organization, and you can begin to promote your brand through as many channels as possible, such as social media, EDM’s, blogs, podcasts, etc.
There are many examples out there of businesses who are have adopted excellent B2B marketing practices. Ultimately, there are many different approaches to B2B marketing that could suit your business, and we have just provided you with a few options today, but it is up to you to decide which of these practices you adopt so that your business can effectively develop a B2B content marketing strategy.