5 Cost-Effective SME Digital Marketing Cheats
SME digital marketing hacks to help you market successfully while maintaining a marketing budget that won’t force you to take that second mortgage.
If you run an SME, the reality is that you don’t have an overflowing budget to dedicate to marketing. Yet the fact of the matter is that without an effective marketing strategy, you won’t even be able maintain, let alone scale your business. Marketing is the lifeblood of businesses, and thankfully there are a few digital marketing techniques that allow you to maintain a reasonable marketing budget.
So without further ado, here are 5 Cost-Effective SME Digital Marketing tips to raise your business up to the next level.
1. Know your audience and your sales funnels
If you don’t know this, then every dollar of your marketing strategy is wasted.
Who exactly is your market, and the more information you have here the better, from age, which gives you a handle on the best social media platforms to utilize, to geographical location. Leave no stone un-turned when it comes to finding out who your audience is. Don’t forget to follow what direct competitors are doing to gauge if your approach seems to be the right one to take.
What sales funnel data are you collecting and crunching?
It’s not enough to know simply know you are audience are, you have to know how this audience is engaging with your business, and where your revenue streams are coming from. And one final thing here, as Tom Burnside, a business and marketing blogger at EliteAssignmentHelp and Academized points out, “analytics must be in place before you commence on marketing campaigns as it is imperative you understand where your sales are coming from”.
Once you have this information and these systems in place, you can truly take a strategic and well-budgeted approach to your digital marketing campaigns.
2. Use great content
Content marketing works. And it does not have to cost the world either, as long as you are producing engaging content that ranks highly in organic SEO searches and relates to your customers. And content does not simply mean words. Use videos, games, infographics and any other technique that you know appeals to your demographic. Instructional videos are a great way to go about engaging potential customers, as are top-10 blog articles and tips.
3. Utilize social media
It’s easy to spread yourself too thinly across all of the major social media channels, so why not target the channels that you know your customers use?
For example, younger people use Snapchat as a go-to source, while thirty somethings are much more likely to run with Facebook or Twitter. Once you have identified the most effective platforms for your business, seek to develop a social media presence through constant updates, not just directly to your business but anything industry related. Don’t forget that reposts and likes are also a great way or organically improving search engine rankings and generating more leads. One final tip here is to utilize social media scheduling tools which can greatly assist in managing your posting schedule, so not everything comes out in bursts.
4. Run great email marketing campaigns
Yes, email still works. However, it has to be completely integrated into your other engagement channels, and always on message with your marketing campaign. Emails don’t just work for existing customer either, but then you must use savvy attention-grabbing techniques to ensure your messages are opened and acted upon. Get customers to sign up to your mailing list by using promotional offers.
“Just see how many high-street shops offer immediate discounts to customers who provide email details when purchasing to understand how invaluable this type of marketing approach can be,” suggests Amy Moran, a marketing manager at State Of Writing and Boomessays.
One last point here, amplify your campaigns by using software which can manage and segment your approach. This can greatly increase conversion rates, but data must be collected and regular testing performed to truly maximize potential.
5. Partner up
So, you have effectively identified your audience and the sales funnels that are paying off. You have launched an effective social media campaign across the platforms that matter to your audience, and are combining this with content and email marketing approaches, what’s the last cost-effective step you can take? Well, identify a brand that you know engages with the same audience, and partner up. Of course you have to give something away to do this, but it does not have to be cold, hard cash. By utilizing special offers, you can piggy-back upon each other’s existing marketing campaigns, and what could truly be more cost effective than this?
So there is it: 5 cost-effective and blended marketing techniques that can truly reap rewards for companies with the smallest of marketing budgets. Not only can these approaches be run with existing expertise, they can be effectively complemented and managed by utilizing marketing software tools which maximize the gains.
Just remember to keep your finger on the pulse, and measure everything that you do.
