Digital Marketing for Your Small Business on a Budget

Most entrepreneurs believe that you have to spend a lot on marketing in order for it to produce viable results. However, it is quite likely that you don’t need to spend as much for an effective marketing campaign. Many a business already has a tight budget, so why spend a large percentage of it on advertising? How to decide about the best approach?

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From PPC, Facebook ads, and email marketing, to SEO, influencer outreach, and what else not, there are many different marketing channels for today’s company. Should you diversify, or place the whole budget into one? Hire someone, or do it yourself? Thankfully, there are a lot of great articles that can help small company owners with this.

We hope this article may present some useful tools that you can use when planning your marketing strategy

Reposting your content

Reposting your content offers an amazing opportunity to get in front of a bigger audience, or just a completely new group of individuals. You can find various profiles on Instagram that dedicate themselves to reposting other people’s content. These profiles often have different criteria for getting your content reposted, but typically, they involve:

• Adding a particular hashtag to your post,
• tagging them in the picture,
• and following their Instagram profile.

Another way to get your content reposted is to manually reach out to accounts you feature in a post. For example, if you would post about another company, contact them and ask whether they would want to share your post with their audience. Manual outreach requires a lot of time and effort but can result in getting reposted more often. Whenever your content gets reposted ensure you still engage with that content. So, if your post receives any comments, feel free to get in there and engage with those users.

Find marketing apprentices

Hiring marketing apprentices can represent a Win-Win situation for both your business and students of marketing. There are numerous platforms that offer just this – connecting those needing access to a marketplace of students and marketing apprentices. Through them, you will be able to work with such eager students in marketing strategy development and execution.

As your company gains additional hands-on help, you will also help out a student marketer who will be able to gain some real-world experience. Many companies utilize this method, mostly because it’s affordable and efficient. As technology advances, we will definitely see more innovations like this one.

Have nice-looking content

Content may be king, but great content is the king of kings. Your website has only a couple of moments to capture the audience’s attention. The sheer amount of content over the Internet can often confuse or deter the audience. Which is why the initial exposure helps people determine whether they want to spend more time reading. Some of the best ways to find the knowledge needed to produce great content are:

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• Reading books and relevant publications, and then summarizing what you’ve read into ideas.
• Investing in self-development.
• Brainstorming with others.
• Telling a story, in order to convey a particular concept.
• Questioning basic assumptions. Not just your own, but also those of your clients and consultants.
• Social networking. If you join smart online communities, you may swiftly gain knowledge of the topics discussed, and how you may be of help to others.
• Taking a contrarian view. For example, discuss a concept’s strengths and flaws.

Then drum up the content

To drum up the content means to find affordable tools that can do just that. There are various content marketing tools out there (For instance, DrumUp) that also serve as a social media post scheduling application. Such tools can aid you to discover content topics that your audience enjoys in and even engage with. Often, they also work as a content recommendation and research tool, or schedule curated content across all accounts and provide insights into your regular social media activity.

When you want to focus more on your Instagram presence, a free Instagram tool like Social Rank can assist you to connect better with your audience. For those considering Twitter, a free Twitter tool like Followerwonk can help. You don’t have to use precisely these tools; they are just some of the many examples when it comes to software you can use to drum up your content.

Marketing budget in a nutshell

Most entrepreneurs cringe at the notion of spending money on digital marketing. Particularly when there are so many other business expenses to consider. However, if you’re in a startup phase, you should expect to spend more than once you’re up and running. The same is true for small companies in highly competitive markets, as a brand and name recognition can mean survival.

Professionals recommend that you spend at least 20% of your revenue on marketing. Although, if you simply cannot afford this at the moment, you can always go with a traditional bank loan or flexible unsecured business loans in order to extend your marketing budget. Remember, paying a small fee to acquire a client that could use your business for life is always a worthy investment.

Free online guides

The final recommendation is focused on small business owners who will handle their marketing efforts all on their own. It’s entirely free except for the time it will take out of your other tasks. This starts with reading free online guides written by other small business owners who were in the same spot as you.

There is an enormous amount of content for this out there. Find websites that publish quality content for business owners, and learn a ton from just taking an hour or two each day to read a couple of articles.

We live in an interesting time where amazing content that was only accessible through university classes just a couple of years ago, can be found on search engines for your learning pleasure. Although many individuals read these articles and only sift through the tips, not enough of them actually research in detail and put the advice into action. Hence, find an article that is relevant to you, print it, pin it in your office and execute some of the great tips that were handed to you.

These are just a couple of the most popular methods that you can concentrate on when you’re developing a digital marketing strategy for your small company. Although, there are many more digital marketing tips that you can experiment on, so your best bet is to try out a couple of them and work out which ones are the most effective for your business. After, keep on tracking your results and optimize your digital marketing campaigns.

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