How to maximise your marketing efforts with a limited budget
Nobody ever imagined that a pandemic would knock at our door. To get the most out of your marketing plan, it’s crucial to utilise your marketing budget to the fullest. Many small business owners are cost-conscious looking for effective ways to reach or hit their target audience with an impact. Therefore, this article will focus on a few things you can opt in to maximise marketing reach within a limited budget.
Make video content
“Content is king”. How about starting with content? According to Blue Corona in 2020, about 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service through videos, and Cisco predicted that video will even make up 82% of all internet traffic in 2021.
As the focus here is to achieve results in a limited budget try not to buy fancy equipment. Instead, invest in a decent camera and microphone that will be your only expense.
Understand current market trends and sentiments of your target audience and leverage them to create video content. This can generate brand awareness for your company. Be consistent at what you do, often people make mistakes here, they do not plan and lose the impression which your brand can possibly make. Also, a video of a live event increases brand favorability. Furthermore, 82% of Livestream’s survey respondents prefer live video from a brand to social posts.
Host an online event or webinar
Although, the right move depends on your budget. If your services are B2B doing a webinar can generate good brand awareness for your product or services. However, if the marketing budget is stringent, co-host a webinar with some company or strategic partner which can complement your product.
This can help you split up your advertising campaign budget. Furthermore, you can deliver a combined knowledge base to your attendees and almost reach twice the audience, all it takes is the time and creativity you and your team can put into this initiative.
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Increase Referrals
Leveraging word of mouth could be a cost-effective way of maximising your marketing efforts. An expensive ad exposure does not necessarily give a rise to sales. On the other hand, an effective way is by doing a referral program among your existing customers.
This technique can enhance your marketing plan to reach a larger audience. A satisfied customer becoming the face of your brand is more convincing than an expensive ad campaign.
In the PayPal referral program, their existing customers can earn $5 for every referred user.
Joint Venture
Joint ventures can be useful to give your marketing plan the ultimate “bang for the buck.” A joint venture can decrease your marketing cost and give you an opportunity to build your brand voice and credibility among your audience.
For example, recently during this COVID 19 crisis, Apple and Google are jointly developing technology to alert people if they have recently come into contact with others found to be infected with the coronavirus.
Analyse your past data and tweak up
In a limited budget, it becomes crucial to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Therefore, direct your resources and marketing activities where they will make maximum impact.
To understand where you can adjust, try to analyse the gaps and mistakes which you made in the past. Likewise, analyse which marketing tactics have worked for you and which you can utilise in your current scenario to generate more conversions, leads, and retention. This tactic will help you eradicate ineffective areas in your marketing campaigns and enable you to reallocate the budget to create even better results.
Engage clients with your blog
Google algorithms reward sites that share relevant, consistent and original content. Provide free quality content on blogs to your target audience, and soft pitch your product in a way where it benefits the users.
By offering meaningful resources in your marketing efforts you can attract more traffic to your website and with consistent valuable content, you can convert them into quality leads. Since they are already looking for something similar to the area of your expertise it’s easy to make an offer.
Of course, use of social media
We are in a social media era. It is the most powerful marketing tool that is mostly overlooked or used wrongly. To target the right customer base you need to check where your audience is active. The most common social media platforms for businesses are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can find a business at least on one of these.
Instagram and Pinterest are helpful for businesses that want to showcase their work visually. Your social media strategy is important. Wasting time on platforms where you cannot reach your audience can be draining. If you are not connecting with your customer, you arent on the right channel.
E-mail Marketing
This method keeps your clients engaged with your brand and makes them come back. By sending regular emails to your current clients with coupons or other incentives this will bring in repeat business. Informing them about company updates maintains transparency and will also make you more trustworthy. New clients providing their emails to you when they purchase a product or service is a way to grow your mailing list. Let them know about discounts and sales they will receive if they sign up.
Case studies
Brag, brag, brag. You have achieved it so you can talk about it. Case studies are a perfect way to showcase your work you have done for clients. You improved the KPIs of your customer? Great. Mention it on your website. Show numbers and success stories. People will love it.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is free advertising and gets 94% of the clicks for Internet searches. 68% of the clicks on search engines, such as Google with 3.5 billion searches a day, are on the top three results. If you have fresh and relevant content on your website it will start to rank on Google, Bing or other search engines. If you do not have time to optimise your website, hire a SEO agency to write your content.
Conclusion
It is better to allocate a maximum portion of your budget to one or two strong approaches or campaigns from where you can build effective leads for your sales funnel. Evidently, creating content will demand a lot of time but if you are a startup or a small business owner you can definitely look for the above methods. As we are in an era where social media is so prominent, creating one or two social media accounts for your business will help you reach a broader audience.
Let’s have a look at a company that has not spend a lot on marketing:
GoPro:
The camera company has spent little to less dollars on traditional marketing. The high-definition camera company did not directly feature the product but the end result on their social media platforms. Users have generated the content for the instagram page of GoPro and their account has more than 18 million followers. Their YouTube account however is what sets the camera company apart. They have over 5 million subscribers where they post engaging and thrilling content.
Liked this article? Why not read “How to develop an iconinc brand”
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