Affordable marketing recommendations for small businesses by Eric J Dalius 

Most small business recognize that they need marketing, but have no idea how to create an affordable marketing strategy for their business.

Launching a business is a huge challenge for entrepreneurs, but the bigger challenge is to make it last and grow fast for which it needs some robust marketing strategies. Although marketing is an integral part of any business, it can be a tough call for small businesses to implement a marketing plan because of the limited marketing budget that it can afford. Sometimes, looking at the business size, which is often of little value, and has a limited vision about growth, one may wonder about the feasibility of implementing a marketing plan and it’s worth. However, one thing is for sure that not having any marketing plan can ruin the business.

EJ Dalius, a renowned and experienced marketer, believes that not having a marketing plan will stifle the growth of small businesses and drive it towards death.

Businesses will have limited longevity if not supported by a proper marketing strategy. Since many affordable online marketing strategies are now available, small businesses can make use of it without straining their budget. Many of the digital marketing plans are quite pocket-friendly, and some are even free but quite effective, which makes it easier for small businesses to adopt it. Even without indulging in expensive digital online ads, small businesses can gain considerable mileage from various marketing strategies, some of which are well within their reach.

Exploit social media like Eric J Dalius

Be clear in mind about using social media for promoting your business and not for selling products and services because it is not a marketplace. Social media is a platform that gives immense opportunities for businesses to interact with the target audience at various levels and in different ways to achieve the marketing goals, but never does it behave like a platform for commercial transactions.

The approach should be to aggressively promote the business and brand with less talk about selling. Any reference for selling during business promotion should be very passive so that it does not seem intrusive at all. You must understand the difference between canvassing and business promotion to avoid agonizing the audience.

Interact with the audience with content that addresses their needs or talk about their interests but has a subtle mention of some aspects of the business, industry, or community while staying connected. There must be a proper balance in the content so that the audience finds it relevant and, at some point, can discover its underlying connection with the business.

Website and Web Hosting

Having an impressive website is a must to take your business online because it becomes the face of your business on the internet. Creating a website is highly affordable today, and you can even do it on your own by using some WordPress theme as it does not require any technical expertise. Even if you leave the task to some developer, it is still quite affordable.

Besides creating an eye-catching website, ensure that it has enough SEO features so that you can launch a forceful marketing campaign. Also, pay attention to the quality of the web hosting service that you use because the website visibility, SEO performance, and user experience largely depend on it.

Do not buy backlinks

Backlinks are links that point back to your website and are the backbone of SEO, which have the biggest influence in the ranking, which makes it mandatory to create an impressive backlink inventory. Small businesses must keep this in mind when implementing SEO. They should adequately follow the Google guidelines of link building to ensure that there is no violation of the rules that can harm the marketing prospects. Google wants you to maintain a healthy link profile by acquiring only quality links and keep the inventory free from poor quality links. Also, the manner of acquiring links should be natural instead of engaging in clandestine transactions for link acquisition like link farming or buying backlinks. Violating the guidelines will attract the Google penalty that can jeopardize the future of your business.

As Google considers each link as a vote that can push up the ranking, buying backlinks would amount to rigging the system, which attracts severe punishment and pushes down rankings. Instead, build relationships with reliable websites with high authority and even look at the opportunities of syndicating content on sites or do guest posting on sites to earn backlinks.

Try out Instagram

Choosing the right social media channels contributes to marketing performance and you must select the channels most frequented by the target audience. Do not focus on the channel’s popularity but consider how effective it will be for marketing needs. Focus on outreach and engagement level. In addition to creating a business profile on Facebook and Twitter, which are most popular, create a profile on Instagram too. It can immediately expand your reach among 300 million users with whom you can stay closely engaged because each Instagram user spends about 21 minutes a day on the platform.

Capitalize on the emotional aspects of images to connect with the audience on Instagram, which will widen your reach among existing and potential customers. You can project your business by using images of different kinds that have a more humane appeal that allows viewers to interact at an emotional level.

Create YouTube Videos

If pictures speak a thousand words, videos could speak a million, or at least it seems so from the high popularity of video content. Small businesses that operate on a low budget would find creating video content quite economical for business promotion because of its free distribution on YouTube, which has a million active users. Video content allows you to reach out to a large section of the audience that either does not have time to consume text content dislikes it. Creating engaging videos for business promotion is one of the effective ways of promoting business, which, if done right, will provide significant returns as it could encourage viewers to visit your website.

With so many affordable marketing options available, it is up to you to take advantage of it.