Business marketing today comes with an endless stream of un-truths, half-truths and hype. Everyone claims to be an expert on the subject, with few offering ideas that actually work upon implementation. It’s no surprise that the average small business owner today cannot make heads or tails of the marketing scene.
Amid all the hype, this point remains true: An enterprise’s eventual success or failure is largely attributable to the kind of marketing campaign it runs. However, the traditional marketing and advertising methods like print, television and radio can be very expensive, particularly for those working with limited marketing budgets. In addition, they have a dismal return on investment, if any.
If you’re going to reach your eventual goals, you must become a master at marketing – spending much less to gain much more.
Even if you decide to engage service providers or invest in project management software to help you run your campaigns, it’s important to be knowledgeable enough to distinguish between a weak and strong marketing strategy to ensure you’re not pumping thousands of dollars down the drain.
Using the techniques given below, you can send effective, targeted messages to your desired audience and still save money on your marketing budget.
Partnered giveaways
Come together with other brands to birth one large contest with a grand prize rather than having small, individual giveaways, separately. All the participating businesses should combine support, distribution, and marketing manpower and share their social media followings and email lists. For instance, one TV Station, Oklahoma News on 6, partnered with a number of businesses in Oklahoma State to promote contests with giveaways.
User-generated content
Encourage your users to create content which increases your business’s brand awareness and following. A perfect example of this is what has been done by BuzzFeed, where community posts are highly encouraged. Sites like HerCampus.com are primarily dictated by their communities, with university women being the primary contributors and determiners of the site content.
In a related idea, you can create a contest to reward the best content from your users, just to up the stakes and ensure you get high quality content. For example, Doritos has been annually hosting a Crash the Super Bowl contest where fans are placed in the running to win a cash reward for creating the brand’s Super Bowl video advertisements.
Customer referrals
Encourage your customers to refer others within their networks to your products and services, and reward them for doing the same. This tactic is responsible for much of Uber and AirBnB companies, which have highly effective referral programs in return for small incentives for participating clients. All you have to do to build up your referral network is to give a small discount, or a product/service/cash reward to both source and recipient of each referral.
Social media
Social media networking offers a number of expense-free channels to advertise your brand, particularly using Twitter and Facebook. The Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) also represents a burgeoning opportunity not yet fully explored. You can invite your following on Reddit to ask any questions and post answers – this has been done by a vast array of individuals and corporate establishments. Reddit AMA has been used for movie promotion by celebrities, brand promotion by large enterprises and creation of awareness by startup companies, among others.
Before you host your own Reddit AMA, ensure you to through some of the threads in your niche so that you have an idea what to expect, and how to answer questions and market your business in the best way. If you have a social media budget, consider putting up a YouTube channel to post videos on some relevant subjects. Borrow a leaf from what’s been done by the channel “Dumb Ways to Die”, which combines skillful animation, black humor and appealing music to pass an important message.
Brand ambassadors
Enlist the services of sociable persons to become brand ambassadors promoting your products of services. They are meant to be representatives of your business, creating awareness and spreading information about your brand in a number of ways. Large enterprises like Amazon and Lyft enlist university students to publicize their offerings and services within various college campuses.
Reengineered campaigns
Rather than start all your marketing campaigns from the dust, redirect, repurpose and/or update one of your older marketing campaigns, which saves you both time and money. Revamp the aspects of the campaign that can still work and get rid of those that were inefficient or unsuccessful.
In addition, this strategy is useful in the creation and sustenance of a consistent brand message, as reported by Rand Group. Having a consistent message builds trust in your brand, and raises brand recognition and awareness over time. Conversely, an inconsistent message can have significant negative ramifications for progress made towards building brand recognition.
On-line marketing tools
There are many free or cheap marketing tools available on-line, which you can use to make your marketing efforts cheaper and more effective. For instance, SurveyMonkey offers free questionnaire and on-line survey tools, making it an excellent for carrying out market research, polling your audience and/or carrying out response analysis.
Another tool is MailChimp, which is a free email marketing tool that comes with newsletter templates to send out an email, including features for email result monitoring and subscriber management options. If you’re interested in the more powerful premium suites, enlist for HubSpot’s free 30-day trial to see whether you like their sales and inbound marketing features.
Weak ads
Stop pouring resources into advertising channels that aren’t performing or giving high ROI. This sounds like common sense, but research has shown that over 46% of ads in various locations go unseen, which means that so many businesses are pouring their hard-earned resources into ads that won’t reach their target audience.
Stay on top of your ads’ performance and ensure they are working to help you meet your goals. If there are channels with little or declining ROI, don’t be afraid to pull the plug and instead redirect that expenditure towards more current and effective strategies with high returns.
Conclusion
Marketing can be both costly and time-consuming in itself, but applying these tips will get your well on your way to finally mastering the game, and at much lesser cost that most conventional strategies would offer.
Daniel Mattei (@mattedt) is a web Marketing Coordinator at Dynamic Search and a filmmaker and founder of Shotlight Productions. He lives with his wife, Grace, and Pomeranian, Couscous in Phoenix, Arizona.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1NddQXM via transformational marketing
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