If you are a digital marketer, then I am going to tell you about Low Cost Marketing Strategies for Startups, so if you want to know about them, then keep reading this article. Because I am going to provide you with complete information about this, so let’s start.
As you all know, in today’s time everyone is doing digital marketing for himself and his business. Because it is quite easy to do. But for this strategies are required.
Because if you do not do marketing with strategies, then it will not be beneficial for you. Here your marketing cost can increase. And you may get fewer results. Because you have not done marketing with strategies
So that’s why I thought why not tell you about Low Cost Marketing Strategies for Small businesses, so let’s start.
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Low Cost Marketing Strategies!
As you all know, that Big companies routinely spend $5,000+ a month on SEO or $5,000+ a month on PPC — or both. Their overall marketing budgets for traditional and digital marketing can easily exceed $25,000 a month.
As a budding entrepreneur, how can you compete? What can you do with a minimal budget to expand brand awareness, build trust, and turn prospects into customers? The answer: You can do plenty, and in some ways do it better than big organizations.
Here is a look at some of your best low-budget marketing options.
What to Look for in Low-Budget Marketing
These are the four attributes of marketing campaigns that you can afford right now — and equally important, campaigns you can sustain and continuously improve over months and years.
- The campaign should serve multiple purposes. To stretch your marketing budget the furthest, you don’t want marketing that just focuses on lead generation, or just focuses on brand perception. Instead, you want to achieve as many marketing goals as possible.
- The campaign should not follow the latest fads. Marketing fads come and go. If you put all your effort into the hot new thing, you might achieve short-term success but end up back at square one in a matter of weeks or months.
- The campaign should have minimal hard costs. Media spends for paid or print ad campaigns, trade show booths, printed sales collateral, etc. chew up budgets quickly.
- The campaign should leverage your expertise. A disadvantage for big companies is that their most knowledgeable people are removed from the marketing trenches. As an entrepreneur, you can speak directly to customers and prospects, expanding their knowledge, building their trust, and influencing their decisions. This is a huge advantage for you.
Your Best Option: Off-Site Publishing
Publishing articles, infographics, or videos on respected and relevant websites/blogs — content created or produced under your direction — checks all the boxes noted above. The payoff on this type of marketing is tremendous.
- Multi-purpose. Getting your content in front of large, new audiences in your target market quickly builds brand awareness. Since you’ll be writing about your products, services, and industry — which you know better than anyone — you’ll build trust among your new readers. Since some of your readers will be curious enough to visit your website, your off-site content will generate sales leads or online revenue. Links from the content back to pages of your website will enhance SEO, even if you do not have a formal SEO campaign underway.
- Tried and true. Off-site publishing has been an effective digital marketing strategy since the ‘00s. Best practices and popular types of content change over time, but as long as you’re up to speed, the opportunity is enormous.
- Minimal hard costs. Writing articles and then marketing their content to publishers require time but a relatively small cash outlay. Although infographic and video production can be somewhat costly, your internal talent resources may be able to reduce the spend. Publishers are eager to accept outside content, so if your execution is good, you will get published.
- Leverages your expertise. As noted, your ability to communicate directly to your target audience sets you as an entrepreneur apart from those faceless corporations that pump out bland, impersonal content.
What you’ll need to know to be successful:
- How to evaluate publishers
- How to select topics
- How to create and edit content professionally
- How to pitch content to publishers
- How to ensure links to your site are incorporated into your published content
- How to evaluate results
Here is a great video that covers this topic in more depth:
Another Great Option: Email Marketing
Email marketing is misused and abused, but don’t let that deter you. Email marketing, when executed properly, checks all the boxes, just like off-site publishing. To explain:
- Multi-purpose. Email content educates customers, communicates special offers, solicits feedback, and promotes loyalty programs, to name just a few advantages. Thus, email campaigns generate sales, build brand loyalty, and/or engage customers. Furthermore, properly segmenting your email list creates highly focused messages to hot prospects, cold prospects, new customers, and long-term customers.
- Tried and true. Email is perhaps a bit too tried and true, since email spam is a major issue with anyone who has an inbox. Nevertheless, email remains the standard for digital communication.
- Minimal hard costs. Many robust and reliable email management platforms are available to automate delivery, list segmentation, list management, split testing, and analytics. These platforms are quite economical, leaving you time to create informative, persuasive, and engaging email messages.
- Leverages your expertise. With off-site publishing, you speak to large new audiences from a digital distance. With email communication, you create a one-to-one communication experience with customers and prospects. Powerful!
What you’ll need to know to be successful:
- Email marketing best practices
- How to vet email management platforms
- How to implement a list segmentation and communication strategy
- Split testing techniques
- How to evaluate results
This is an excellent introductory video to email marketing:
If You Have Marketing Money Left Over …
Off-site publishing and email marketing make sense for virtually every business. Other budget-friendly marketing options also make a world of sense, depending on the nature of your business. Important options to consider include:
- Local SEO. If you serve a local market(s), a great deal of local SEO can be done by your staff or an affordable SEO specialist. For instance, setting up a Google My Business profile and adding NAP (name, address, phone number) to your website pages make a significant difference and can be done in hours.
- Social media. Social media is effective for building brand awareness and lead/revenue generation — if your target market is active on social media. But be careful: social media can be a time suck, so make sure you have solid objectives and metrics.
- SEO. SEO is a long-term marketing proposition hard to execute on a tight budget. Nevertheless, certain aspects of SEO, such as making sure your website is SEO-friendly and mobile-friendly, ought to be done as early as possible. The job will only grow more expensive over time and slow down a future SEO campaign.
- Referral programs. Implementing a formal referral program works for many B2Bs, and for consumer products/services that are innovative and/or extremely affordable. The budgetary advantage of referral programs: they are self-funding!
This article is written by Brad Shorr, and Brad Shorr is Director of Content Strategy at Straight North, a Chicago-based Internet marketing company that specializes in SEO. With decades of marketing, sales, and management experience, Shorr has written for leading online publications including Forbes and Entrepreneur, and for the American Marketing Association.
I hope, now you have come to know about Low Cost Marketing Strategies. And now if you want, you can read this article related to it.
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