Partner Article

3 Ways You Can Market Your Business Without a Budget

As a start-up or an SME, you may be reluctant to set aside a hefty budget just to dedicate to your marketing efforts. Chances are the cash flow doesn’t quite allow for it, or other elements such as recruitment are just more important right now.

But just because you don’t have huge amounts of money to throw at marketing, it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon it completely. There are strategies to be implemented that may require a little monetary investment but mainly draw on your knowledge, expertise and time.

Below are some of the most effective ways that you can increase your brand awareness, improve your SEO efforts and build trust with your peers and audience that usually require nothing more than some of your time each month.

Blogging

As a business owner or leader, you are the expert in your business, and probably know a thing or two about your industry also.

So why not put all of this knowledge and expertise in a blog? While many of you out there still haven’t bought into the value of ‘blogging’, still viewing it as a frivolous and fluffy marketing activity, there are some pretty impressive stats to support its cause.

Websites that have a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages; the fact is, having more content will boost SEO efforts, and your site will be acknowledged as a hub for useful information and resources.

What’s more, its reported that just under 50% of customers engage with a sales department or representative after reading between three and five pieces of content, meaning that your blog posts have the ability to resonate with people at all stages in the sales funnel.

Each blog post should be written with purpose – what do you want the reader to learn from it? Opinion and thought-led pieces tend to attract more views, comments and shares – widening the reach, so don’t be afraid to write with a strong view.

“We draw on previous conversations with our customers or prospects for inspiration for blog content”, explains Richard LeCount from USB4Photographers, “Which related topics have sparked interesting conversations, or what questions do we find ourselves being asked regularly? If you challenged yourself, you could probably write a list of 10 titles based on questions that arise in and about the industry you are in.”

Don’t limit yourself with word count, instead, be sure to write with your audience in mind, and ensure that your piece is valuable, packed full of information and has actionable points where applicable. While keyword stuffing is not advisable, it’s good to keep them in mind, and used with caution where appropriate.

Your content should be natural, authentic and engaging. Consistency is key, so even if you can only spare time to write one blog post a month, make sure that you stick to this schedule, and ask others in the team, or even in your industry, to contribute too.

Email Campaigns

“Despite a wealth of new challengers in the digital communications industry, email remains one of the most effective channels for building and sustaining customer relations, generating sales, and building brand awareness.” explains Lucy Stevens in her MarketingZine article.

Apart from the retail sector, it seems that email campaigns have fallen by the wayside. But email campaigns still offer a wealth of benefits for small businesses, to start, email marketing provides an ROI of 3800%.

Personalised emails improve click-through rate by 14% and conversion by 10%, and those subscribed to your emails are 30% more likely to share your content on their social platforms.

Once you have some solid blogs in place – why not share them in an email campaign? Spend time researching and considering the email title – you want to entice the user to open it and click-through to your site. In the early stages, you could test different titles by segmented your lists and analyse which title gets the most open rates and click through’s. Then you can adopt the same tone with the following emails and send to your whole database.

Don’t use a hard sell technique, sure include offers, but sharing blogs and industry news or even company updates will enable you to build trust with your subscribers and analyse the ways that they interact with your company.

Map your data from your email against other business and sales data, and create personalised offers based on the findings.

Using email services such as MailChimp make the strategy easy to execute and analyse and is free until you hit a specified number of sent emails – it’s then an affordable monthly fee. Be sure to use a set template each time, and obtain the RGB or Hex codes for the colours that your business has adopted to maintain consistency.

Social Media

Before you dismiss social media entirely, consider your audience – where are they going to see your brand? Whether you are b2b or b2c, it’s likely that being active on social media is going to raise your profile.

Just having a profile and being active makes you relevant; if your audience search for you and you simply aren’t there, they will question why not.

There will be at least one platform that is aligned with your brand, or if you decide you want to be on all of them, be aware of the purpose of being present. For example, you could use Twitter predominantly for customer service and engagement, LinkedIn for vanity marketing among other industry professionals - sharing company updates and posting blog content, Snapchat to showcase products and Instagram to communicate your team and company culture.

95% of adults aged 18-34 follow a brand via social networking, and more than 70% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend that brand.

Many businesses are avoiding being present on social media due to the element of vulnerability it adds, and that is true, you are at the mercy of millions of people, who are free to share their opinions. In fact, 78% of those people who complain to a brand on Twitter expect a response within 60 minutes. But, with this being said – handle a complaint correctly, and it will only serve to boost your brand.

Jason Myers from AudienceBloom explains, “Your social media networks are just new channels for your brand’s voice and content. This is important because it simultaneously makes you easier and more accessible for new customers, and makes you more familiar and recognizable for existing customers.

Don’t take to social media without a solid strategy for each platform. What is the purpose for being present on each one, and what do you want your presence to generate? Plan how each platform will be used, what will be shared, how often and at what times (each platform offers analytics, so you can monitor which type of post receives the most engagement), and if hashtags are relevant, which ones are most popular?

On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags widen your reach dramatically, so if you are using it is increase your audience, or share your blog content – these are critical.

If you find that these strategies bring you success with little to no budget put behind them, as the business grows you can analyse the success of each one and decide to amplify this by investing in the strategy, and becoming more creative in the way that you executive them. This could be by implementing different means of content such as including video in your emails, using a copywriter or agency to write more blogs for you to post each month, or using paid ads on social media platforms.

The great thing about digital marketing strategies is that there is no hard and fast rule; test everything as many times you choose to find out what works for you, segment your audience and never stop learning – it will only serve to bring you more success.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rebecca Moore .