You don’t need a large budget to create and distribute effective digital marketing activity.
There are plenty of free or low-budget tactics you can implement to help generate brand awareness, engage potential and existing customers and drive sales growth.
Here are 8 of Superfast Business Wales’ favourite low-budget digital marketing techniques
Email marketing
Email marketing is a great tactic for businesses of any size, and still has the highest return on investment for small businesses. Developing effective email newsletters or automated email marketing provides a great way to keep in regular contact with your fans and customers. Regular communication with your audience will help you to keep your brand in their minds, develop long-term relationships and increase up- and cross-selling opportunities.
Mailchimp is a popular choice for email marketing. If you are just starting out the free version can help you get off the ground. The free version allows up to 500 contacts and up to 2500 email sends a month, plus many more options you need to get started whilst you build up your database. It is worth the investment in the long run to extend your customer database. Mailchimp as also has premium options for optimal usage.
Content is always king!
Great, regular relevant content is what will keep consumers returning to your website and business. Whether it is advice articles, research pieces, news or updates, useful content demonstrating your expertise or news in your business field will add more value to the customer journey and ensure your website and social channels remain current and up to date. There are great free tools you can use to keep up to date in your field such as setting up Google alerts.
This will return easy relevant content based on what keywords you set up. This will not only attract visitors but give you great material for social media profiles and email marketing activities and will help your business to rank better in search engines.
Get visual with video
Try your hand at creating informational or demonstration videos to help your customers. Nowadays potential customers like to see the brand behind the camera. Behind the scenes and how to videos instantly engage viewers. This became even more prominent when the pandemic hit and suddenly businesses had to move online. This is when platforms such as TikTok became a great platform for businesses, as the demographic for this type of channel increased rapidly throughout Covid. Video content can be easily and freely made in-house considering most video content these days is done on mobile and can be edited at the touch of a finger using various apps.
Be a social butterfly and get networking
Make the most of the growing number of social networks to engage with your customers, share your content and develop your brand personality. By scheduling regular updates, you can ensure your business is always active online, even during busy work periods. There are lots of scheduling tools available at little or no cost depending on how many social channels you have, such as Hootsuite. It is important to remember that your business doesn’t need to be on every single social media channel.
If your audience aren’t likely to be using a channel in relation to your type of business, it is pointless having a dormant account. For example, if your business was photography your target audience would more than likely be on a platform like Instagram. Whereas if you were a news outlet a majority of your target audience would probably be on Twitter.
Recycle old content
If you’re struggling to generate new content ideas, consider creative ways that you can repurpose your existing content. You could turn some research into an infographic, create a video based on content from an old article (as long as it is still relevant) or consider new ways to get your content in front of a wider audience. It’s unlikely that all your customers have seen your existing content especially when you think of the algorithms on social platforms, so there’s plenty of opportunities to be resourceful and inventive!
Think about content that is ‘Evergreen’. Evergreen content refers to content that continues to be relevant. It is content that is optimised to stay fresh for readers. It is also content that isn’t time sensitive or particularly seasonal. For example, blogs on digital marketing will always be evergreen as there is always a need for it. Content to do with the Covid 19 pandemic would not be considered evergreen content.
Make the most of customer referrals
Word of mouth is a powerful tool for growing businesses as these free recommendations can help raise awareness and drive sales. Also, people will take these recommendations and begin researching based on the reviews and testimonials. It’s important to get your past and present customers to generate reviews on Google, Yell, Facebook etc. When thinking about retention of current customers and acquisition of new customers, creating a referral programme is good way to go. You could encourage customers to share an email or link with their friends for both of you to receive a discount or gift when the prospect converts. A lot of businesses nowadays practice in referral/loyalty schemes.
User generated content
Encourage your customers to share their own photos, review, and videos with you via your website or social media. This will not only help to create awareness of the business amongst their own circle of followers and friends but provides great user-generated content that you can, with their consent, use to show your product or service in action. These real-life endorsements act as another great online testimonial to encourage potential buyers.
Partnerships and collaborations
Are there opportunities for you to partner or collaborate with other businesses in your field or complimentary sectors? Far from being counterintuitive, if you choose the right business to work with you could help to cross-promote both businesses and drive sales. You could increase sales growth by effectively raising your profile in the field, reaching a new un-tapped audience, and increasing awareness of your business.
Collaborations and endorsements have become the norm on platforms such as Instagram, often in the form of celebrities and paid partnerships. Brands are utilising famous faces to endorse their brands. Obviously small businesses wouldn’t have these sorts of options available to them but collaborating with suppliers, for example, will spread the word both ways. After all, without suppliers how would your business deliver the products/services? Think about the value they add to your product/service and showcase that.