When you launch a new marketing initiative, there are five primary methods you can use to keep your costs low. Gone are the days of prohibitively expensive advertising. Today, building solid communities by offering your consumers value-added information or entertainment can be far more effective than spending millions of dollars on an ad campaign.
1. Use Social Media
Utilizing social media channels can be the most effective and inexpensive marketing initiative in your arsenal. However, opening an account and creating a profile are not enough for social media to work. It is essential to engage your target audience and interact with them, directly and regularly.
To maximize your reach in order to drive the optimal amount of desirable traffic to your website, you must update your social media channels at least once a day. It is also critical to provide your audience with helpful tips, educational information, and entertainment. By monitoring your analytics, you will determine which information is leading to the most conversions.
2. Develop a Blog
All businesses should have a blog. Fortunately, it is not essential to update a blog every day, the way it is for social media. The quality of information and SEO content is far more critical in this marketing initiative. You should concentrate on information that will support your products and services.
For example, if you are about to launch a new app for restaurants, you should discuss how restaurants utilize various restaurant-specific applications as a means to increase their sales. You want to share reasons that your product or service might just be what your audience is looking for, while not necessarily hard-selling it to them directly.
3. Utilize Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a remarkable and relatively perspiration-free way to reach an already established target market. The challenge in guest blogging is that too many well-established blogs are overwhelmed with requests. This is a classic free-market tactic: you have to identify the ideal partners for your business and convince them you have something of excellent value to offer them in exchange.
One of the reasons to guest blog is to develop backlinks on external websites that are tied to your own sites. You must be willing either to provide a blog exchange or to reassure your potential partner that you will in turn promote their business or service on your sites. Perhaps this method of marketing is not entirely free, in the end.
4. Focus On Creative Campaigns
You should also try to be creative with your marketing campaigns. One way is to select a beta group to test your products or services for free. In exchange, ask them to endorse your company if they like the product or service by writing a review, blogging, or sharing a thread in an industry group that relates to your business.
You might also consider giving away samples of your product or service by choosing a select few people who participate in your social media campaign. The options are unlimited.
5. Send Out Newsletter
It is also helpful to provide a newsletter to your community. This is an alternative to their receiving daily emails from you. Some followers may not have time to review your social media site(s) every day; instead, a newsletter provides them with a recap of the week and includes important announcements they might have missed. You can also consider rewarding various individuals for their active participation on random occasions over the course of the year.
Apart from the time to create and manage them, you do not have to spend anything to create and maintain these initiatives. However, budgeting a small monthly fee can easily expand your reach and enhance the quality of such initiatives.
Utilizing social media to its fullest, starting a blog filled with reasons that your product or service is needed, taking the time to guest blog on a reciprocal basis, being creative with social media campaigns, and distributing a newsletter are the most effective ways to keep your online marketing costs in check.
