Creating a cost-effective and successful marketing plan that yields a great return on investment can sound challenging and complex for many small business owners, but it may actually be easier than you might think. The reality is that email, website and social media remain the primary marketing tools for small businesses to use. With a closer look at how your own business can use these marketing methods more strategically, you can take your upcoming marketing campaigns to the next level.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is direct and focused. More than that, when you set up an opt-in feature for email marketing, you are able to send messages to customers who have specifically requested to receive your promotional detail. This is essentially a captive and interested audience that may already know and love your company. While some people will save their email messages to act on at a later date, many will take immediate action when you send out an email campaign. This means that you can generate fast results from a single message. Remember that email marketing can be very cost-effective. You can create basic text and graphic campaigns to meet your various needs, or you can create video messages that are more informative and captivating. All of these messages can be forwarded to others by your recipients to further expand your reach to a broader market. This makes email marketing highly cost effective.
Website Marketing
Website marketing is another fabulous way to reach your target audience. This may be marketing that directs online users to your website, such as through a pay-per-click campaign or banner ads. While some of these options may be costly, you often can control the cost through various features available to better manage your budget. Remember that not all online marketing is expensive. For example, regular blog posts are affordable or even free to create if you write them yourself, and they have proven to be an effective marketing method for many companies in a wide range of niches. You can even use social media to draw attention to your blog posts without cost.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can be free or paid depending on the methods you use. For example, you can purchase ad space on Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites, and you often can focus your ads placement to target a specific demographic. You can also set up a free business profile or account on these and other social media sites. Your customers can follow you on your business pages, and this is a way for them to opt into your marketing messages. Every tweet or post you create will be fed into their direct social media feed within seconds, and this is a free and direct way to generate a fast response. Many social media platforms also allow your followers to share the content you create. This means that your online content on social media sites may extend far beyond the reach of your group of followers on these sites.
However, you should know that the realm of social media is not confine to just the popular Facebook and Instagram. Yes, those are still important. Yet, it includes any site where your company can put up a profile page. ASEA, for example, does this with Crunchbase and there are other such websites out there for you to do the same. These are important as they help to build you brand awareness, provide contact information for potential customers, and establish your authority on Google.
Many small business owners are stymied by the task of trying to market their goods and services effectively on a very limited budget. Online marketing continues to be a top solution to consider, and you can see that there are many affordable or even free ways you can market your goods and services through these methods. Now is a great time to review your marketing plan and to look for different ways to creatively use these methods to boost your marketing efforts and maximize your return.