If you want to improve your profits, you have to spend time and money on marketing. But what if you don’t have a huge budget to advertise on all of those expensive channels like TV, radio or print? Below are some things to consider when you are marketing your company in a budget.
Let’s take a look at some ways you can get your brand out there without spending too much on marketing.
1. Co-promote your offers.
Approach other brands related to your business to set up giveaways, contests and other promotions. Co-promotion is beneficial for all of the parties involved because each of their products is viewed by a larger audience that their partners’ brand brings in. Make sure you are distributing the marketing workload equally amongst yourselves and this should be a great strategy. One of our clients used this strategy with their hunting inspired clothing company. They partnered up with a hunting guide service and together they benefited from each other’s marketing efforts. One of their strategies was to promote a giveaway to go on a 6 day hunting trip. This promotion drives customers to engage with the brand in order to win something that is priceless to them and at the same time promotes the guide service to an audience that is already in their demographic. This can be implemented in many ways with just about any industry! A little outside the box thinking and some networking and you are ready for a co-promotion campaign that can be extremely profitable.
2. Involve the community in content creation.
If you want to improve user interaction with your brand, let them contribute to your content. Most of the largest companies use this strategy all the time and so can you! Ask your potential customers to be a part of your brand, ask them to engage and you will see that most customers are eager to do this.
Contests and giveaways work really well for encouraging users to contribute to your pages. We will use our same hunting inspired clothing client as an example. We asked our audience on social media to submit photos of themselves hunting and encouraged them to be wearing ‘our clothing’ in those photos. This brings out those fans and allows the company and the fans themselves to interact with one another. At that point, you are building a community and generating a desire to be a part something bigger than just a t-shirt.
3. Incentivize affiliate behavior.
Provide incentives to your existing users to refer your product or service to someone they know. Uber is a great example of a company which rewards its’ users for getting someone new on board. Provide people discounts and special prices if they manage to refer other users to you. Generate coupon codes on your website to track the sales and see what affiliate or what piece of advertisement is bringing you the best results. Offer discounts, giveways, rewards, and anything else you can think of to make your customers work for you. If you go to a steakhouse and love the food then you will be eager to tell your family and close friends about it, add some incentive and you will find yourself telling everyone about it!
4. Focus on social media.
Social media platforms are a great, low-cost way to advertise your brand. You can run contests on your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages to get people talking about your company. If you’ve got some money to spare, you can create some ads and target your potential customers and drive them to your profile or directly to your website. The audience you target can be as specific as you’d like, for example; if you are promoting a new gym you can target your audience by age, gender, location, even down to targeting someone who likes fitness magazines, other gyms, certain supplements, etc. Your customers are already out there and nowadays it is very easy to find them.
5. Partner with influential individuals to promote your brand.
Brand ambassadors are a great way to get your company name out there. You can approach community leaders “influencers” and other people with influence to promote your product or service. Instagram and Facebook are the perfect medias to use to work with people in your industry. If you have a gun inspired clothing company, then you can find those gun enthusiasts pages that have hundreds of thousands to millions of followers already on them and use those to promote your brand. Many of those charge a very minimal fee to post your images to advertise your brand to their followers and it is completely worth it.
6. Use email marketing and surveys.
Email marketing is a great way to engage with your users. Most people check their inbox every day and if you provide them good content with the occasional offer then they’re more likely to become paying customers. If you buy from Best Buy, you will eventually start getting their e-mails on a regular basis. It will get to the point where you no longer think of it as spam, but you will get used to seeing their e-mails in your inbox; that is the goal of e-mail marketing. If you have a customer, then you need to keep them as recurring customers, stay connected, and let them see your brand on their inbox, social media feed, and hopefully when they browse (with some Google advertising and re-marketing as the budget grows).
7. Pull the plug on non-performing advertising.
Too many people waste money persevering with bad advertisements. Those magazine ads that used to work so great years ago are no longer generating the ROI (Return on Investment) they used to. Marketing can be a costly process, but there are ways you can go about it smartly. Even if you don’t currently have unlimited funds to brute force your message through, you can use inexpensive tools and good content to improve your visibility. Use the tips and tricks mentioned above to keep up with your better-funded competition. Stay away from those expensive methods at the beginning. Advertisements such as; billboards and magazines are for those companies who are just embedding their brands subliminally in your head.
