"Marketing is expensive but my budget is small"

Every small business owner has their own marketing dreams to grow their business. The good news is you can find effective marketing plans while staying within your budget. You do that by not boiling the ocean. You can be lean, effective, and scalable by using affordable technology. 

An example of expensive marketing is Traditional Advertising. We all know that TV commercials, radio ads, magazines, billboards, and newspaper ads can cost a lot. At the same time, they are not trackable. You cannot track the number of impressions hence difficult to understand your ROI. Traditional advertising is good for brand building but it's not necessarily good for ROI or for lead generation. What you can do is look at more affordable options such as Digital Marketing.

Inexpensive Digital Marketing

• It is free to start up a social media business page on almost all the platforms.
• Email marketing is very affordable and you can reach thousands of people
• Your website does not need thousands of dollars to make it effective
• By creating affordable videos you will still get full benefits for your business
• You can do Search Engine Optimization to help you rank on search engines 
• Have a lot of content about you being an expert in your industry.

See Related Article: Top Marketing tips for getting your business noticed

Yes, there are very expensive approaches to traditional advertising but there are also less expensive ways like digital marketing but how do you bridge that gap?

Bridging The Gap Between Traditional and Digital Marketing

Decide what to do. The answer is Essentialism.

There is a book out there called Essentialism and it's not only good for business owners but it's also good for your everyday life as we are all doing a thousand things at the same time.

A way to figure out what is most essential is to prioritize what is most important right now. You can spend all of you energy on many different things at one time and make very little progress on each of them or you can choose one thing and make a lot of progress on that. This is how you bridge the gap, you have to prioritize. If you have 10 things on your list and one thing is due Friday and one other thing is due today, you're going to start with the one that's due today.

A lot of times we like to check things off the list that are easier because we can check them off quickly but that is not how it should work. You need to do what is most essential today. 

From a marketing standpoint, you have to build your foundation first.

Essential Tools For Marketing

1. Brand Guidelines

It's understanding who you are as a company, and who your target market is. If you can't answer those two questions then you need to go through a branding exercise to understand who you are and who you're trying to attract.

Once you know the answers, you can start shaping your messaging that is most attractive to your target market.

2. Website

This is your online storefront where you're going to tell everybody to go for your products and services. A website is extremely important. You want it to be professional, well-designed, have a good user experience, and call-to-actions all over the place.

3. Project Management Software

Asana is a free project management software that is very helpful for small business owners. It's great for having a marketing calendar or any type of calendar needed for your business. There is a task organizer where you can assign tasks to your employees and track everything. 

4. CRM/Email Platform 

Customer or Client Relationship Management platform is where you can organize your contacts and send mass emails. Hubspot is a really good option where you can send up to 2000 emails per month.

Every small business owner should start with these 4 marketing tools. Once you have your foundation built then you can build up from that.

Build up

Google Business Page

This is free. You can claim your Google business page and fill out your business hours. You can add photos and videos, you can post updates and promotions. You want to do this because you can control what Google pulls out from your site when somebody searches for your business. If you do not claim your business page, Google will automatically pull that information for you so you definitely want to have control over that.

Social media business pages

The first thing to do is understand where your target market is hanging out or which platforms they like to use. That is where you want to create business pages. You need to post consistently with really good content that is educational and entertaining to your target audience. When posting, link it to your website so that you are driving traffic from both Google and social media. 

Blogging

Start blogging on your website. Fill them with content and videos. Make sure they are informational and not promotional so your target audience will benefit from them. You can create topics driven by the FAQs of your current customers. 

Pro Tips: People love “listables”! (5 ways to build a business or 3 ways to do start a blog) Blog posts that readers can scan through, see headlines, and read quickly are great! Also, add internal and external links within your site and to reputable sources outside your site. Do keyword research to make your blogging have more quality and be more searchable from your target audience.

See Related Article Here: Blogging Ideas To Grow Your Business

Videos

You can create 2-min videos for your audience. Videos are a great way for you to share your content in a fast effective way rather than writing. You should have both as videos are really effective. You can also start a Youtube channel where all of your Youtube videos can live and then you can embed the links onto your site.

Email

You need an email platform so that you can distribute your message. The emails can be newsletters. It will allow you to stay in front of your audience and allow you to nurture your leads. 

To retain customers, emailing them consistently and effectively is a must. Give them beneficial information. You can give them little teasers, they can be very short and sweet and they can link to more information. In addition, always give them a small interesting offer. When you have a target audience that is ready to pull the trigger on a product or service that you're offering at that time this really shows that you're a leader in your industry. 

Track Marketing Metrics

With digital marketing, it’s easy to find effective data that will help you shape your next moves. 

• In social media, you can track your posts such as the most engaged posts, the most viewed posts, etc.
• In Google Analytics, you can track all the activities on your website
• In Email Platforms, you can track all of your emails and find open rates. 

These data will help you understand the return on investment for all of the digital marketing that you are doing. It will also help you shape your marketing behavior for the future. If you are posting something that nobody ever engages with or nobody ever likes, stop posting that one and do more of what is working.

In a nutshell

Make sure that you prioritize. Work on the foundational items first, then build up from there.

• You want a well-oiled machine for your marketing ecosystem so you want to start with a brand message.
• Build a storefront online - your website. Utilize effective and affordable technology to get things accomplished.
• Create videos and blogs so have content to share with your target audience.
• Have social media platforms and a Google business page
• Distribute your brand message through email marketing where you can reach tens of thousands of people with a click of a button.
• Make sure you are analyzing your marketing efforts so that it can shape the future marketing decisions you will make. 

Very important thing is to be patient because good things take time. Marketing does not happen overnight, it can take years to build up a very strong brand but you will do nothing but prosper from it in the end.

 

Contact Desirae Now.