We all know that marketing can be expensive and sometimes we don’t have the budget to hire a full time marketing team. With that in mind, here are 10 ways from Clean ERSJ you can make your marketing more economical while still getting the results you’re looking for.
1. Determine Your Goal
It’s very important to establish a goal before you do anything else. If you don’t know the answer to this question, then your marketing is going to be pointless and a waste of time and money. Ask yourself: What is the ultimate goal I am trying to accomplish with my marketing? Answering this question will help you to stay focused as well as help you determine what kind of budget you should be working with.
2. Come up with a Marketing Strategy
Once you have established a goal, it’s time to come up with a strategy that will allow you to meet this goal. You want to come up with a strategy that is going to produce the best results at the best price. If you spent $1,000 on someone who can create a marketing plan and they told you it will produce 500 leads and 500 sales in 90 days and it costs $1,000 for this service and someone else tells you they can do the same thing for $5,000… who would you choose? The answer is obvious.
3. Use Social Media
Social media has proven to be very effective in helping businesses increase their bottom-line. It allows you to connect with your customers and leads in a way that was not possible just a few years ago. You can build an audience on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube. These are the platforms that are bringing your business to the attention of your target market.
4. Find the Right Tool
You don’t have to spend a ton of money to get social media traffic. You can use free tools that can increase your reach significantly. If you have a webpage or blog site that offers unlimited pages, then you should also include social media buttons on these pages. It’s important to note that if you’re just starting out with social media marketing then it’s best not to get too crazy with it because you might burn yourself out by over-doing it.
5. Offer a Free Gift
Offering a free gift to people who sign up for your mailing list can be a great way to grow your mailing list and generate some social media traffic. You don’t have to limit yourself to just one free gift either. You can offer several different gifts that will appeal to various demographics of people. In order for this strategy to work effectively you’ll need to provide high quality products or services, but by offering the right value you’ll not only get more targeted traffic, but you’ll also gain credibility with prospective clients; which will lead back into more sales opportunities for you business.
6. Be Consistent
Your budget doesn’t have to be a static figure. Some of the most effective marketing campaigns I’ve seen were able to create a buzz on a limited budget. They were able to do this by being consistent with their marketing schedule and sticking to it. You can use social media on a daily or weekly basis, but what’s even better is connecting more frequently by using platforms like Twitter and Facebook which allow you to post multiple times per day at no additional cost.
7. Use Video Marketing
Video marketing is extremely cost-effective and it ranks high on the list of favorite social media platforms that people use most often for watching videos. You can create videos for YouTube or any other video platform and post to them daily, weekly or less often. Your videos don’t have to be long like a movie, they can be short 5-10 minute videos that are very easy to make.
8. Optimize Your Content
Once you post your videos on YouTube, you’ll need to optimize them so that they show up in Google searches when people are looking for what you’re talking about. Optimization isn’t difficult at all, but it does take some time and effort on your part. You can use an app such as Fiverr to do this for you. There are tons of people who will guide you through this process and they’ll take care of all the technical things so that you can focus on what’s important: your message and your content.
9. Don’t Forget About Facebook and Google+
Facebook and Google+ allow you to create separate pages for each of your business pursuits; which allows you to maintain a certain level of separation between each one. You should create separate social media pages for each type of marketing you offer like e-mail, blogging, YouTube, etc… If you don’t, then it could be potentially confusing to your target market.
10. Use Social Media Tools to Track Your Marketing
Social media tools are great for monitoring your social media campaigns and tracking the activity you receive on each platform. You can easily see who has liked, commented or shared any particular post (ideally this information should be available to you on LinkedIn already). If you’re not getting enough social media traffic from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, then there are a few things you can do. Tweets can get lost in the shuffle or your videos may not get seen by viewers unless they happen to follow along with them from a blog post or website link.
