Providing a quality product or service is important for any kind of business. However, there’s one other thing you need to think about — marketing. There’s no way around it; if you want people to appreciate your product, they need to be aware of it first. And this can be a struggle for small businesses and entrepreneurs, whose budgets aren’t equipped to handle sprawling marketing campaigns.
Luckily, there are ways to expand the reach of your business to your target audience without spending too much money. With that in mind, we’re going to showcase a couple of affordable marketing strategies with which you’re sure to achieve success!
Facebook Ads
Facebook is not just a social network — it’s *the* social network, meaning the most popular platform on the planet. And because of this, small businesses all around the world advertise themselves on Facebook. It’s not too costly, and yet it is amazingly effective at marketing your pitch to the right target audience. Digital marketing of this sort is crucial to the success of your business, especially if you don’t have a big budget for retail ads.
Facebook advertisements do a great job of allowing you some of the most advanced targeting options on the Internet. You can easily pinpoint your target audience on the basis of a huge variety of factors, ranging from people’s online interests to their sex and age.
You don’t need a lot of copywriting for Facebook ads either. A bit of flashy copy will suffice, along with a killer headline. Beyond that, all you need is a link to your website and one featured image, and you’re good to go!
Plus, Facebook boasts a powerful yet simple Ads Manager, allowing you to manage multiple campaigns and see which brings you the most audience attention. And you can do all of that without having much marketing expertise either.
Google My Business
Let’s face it — there’s no marketing in 2020 without Google. While most digital marketers will use the generic term “search engines” when talking about their work, we all know what search engine they mean by that. Google holds an incredulous network share of over 90%, with Bing, Yahoo, and various smaller competitors sharing a distant second place. With that in mind, optimizing your business for Google is important. Among other things, that means making use of the Google My Business platform.
Having a Google My Business ranking is perhaps the most crucial among various affordable marketing strategies you can try. There’s truly no strategy more powerful in terms of reaching out to the most consumers.
When people want to find any kind of goods or services, they search for them online — most often on Google. Any kind of search query leads towards listings made with Google My Business; bear in mind that these come before the organic results.
A business that manages to rank within top GMB for its niche can look forward to literally thousands of leads on a daily basis, and it doesn’t cost anything! Google My Business gives you access to all kinds of Google options for making your business more visible: a map location, answers to Google reviews, Google Analytics metrics, as well as Google Insights.
There are no two ways about it: Google My Business is essential for making your business more visible and credible to online consumers. If you want to try online marketing strategies, this should be your first choice. Optimization for this part of the Google Platform isn’t that difficult either. Once you fill out your profile, all you need to do is collect some citations and find reviews for your business.
Content Marketing
Regardless of what kind of advertising you’ve got, there’s one thing you need to realize while you try out affordable marketing strategies — content is still king.
Most marketers will tell you that there is no part of your marketing campaign that has a bigger impact on its success than the actual content.
Content marketing represents the entire process of coming up with consistent, original, and valuable content while also finding the best ways to distribute it to consumers. At the end of the day, this is what your target audience will appreciate the most, and this is what will drive them to action.
Compared to paid advertising, content marketing doesn’t bring you immediate results. It’s something you need to plant the seeds for and reap the benefits later. Initially, you won’t find yourself with much of a pay-off, but it can be really rewarding in the long run.
In order to successfully implement content marketing, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. First and most obvious, your content needs to be of sufficient quality, and relevant to your niche. Then, it needs to have the right SEO behind it. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process of optimizing your content so that Google and other search engines find it easily. Seeing as most Internet traffic actually comes from search engines, it’s important for your content to be discoverable.
Social Media Marketing
Besides SEO content, there is another among the most cost-effective affordable marketing strategies you should think about — social media marketing. In this day and age, not having a social media account on the major networks means not having a brand at all. People have gotten used to the idea of communicating and interacting with corporate accounts of their favorite brands — and not giving them that option when it comes to your business will make you seem cold and distant.
Brand managers have made an entire science out of utilizing social media to maintain a positive public image, and with good reason. You need to think about what your brand voice will be like; what sort of values your company stands behind, and what sort of message you want to project. This goes beyond mere advertising of your services and products. In order to be successful in 2020, your company needs to be an entity with a set of beliefs it’s ready to be vocal about.
