As an entrepreneur, you have to wear many different hats and juggle many priorities at once you’re handling product development, sales, and of course, marketing. It’s no piece of cake and requires you to divide your already limited resources in a smart way that helps you optimize product quality and product reach.
Developing the perfect product only to have it remain unused because no one knows about it hardly sounds like an ideal outcome. Hence, the end goal of getting new customers should be somewhere at the top of your list. In order to achieve it successfully, you need an effective marketing plan: you must launch big and promote tirelessly to establish your brand identity. But you can’t spend all your time and budget on marketing either so you’re always looking for ways to cut costs while still being ultra-effective.
How can you start reaching your target audience and build brand awareness effectively without breaking the bank? Here are 6 simple but effective ways that will help your business achieve unparalleled growth while saving you big bucks.
1. Embrace Social Media
Social media popularity has grown exponentially in the past few years. According to 2019 social media statistics, there are now 3.2 billion users around the globe – that is about 42% of our total global population. Marketing on a platform where your target audience gathers every day can be a powerful tool in a marketer’s toolkit 90% of marketers already cite social media as important to their business.
Why is it so important to seize this opportunity immediately? Using social media can help you generate greater brand awareness amongst your audience and increase inbound traffic to your website. It also gives your customers a platform to engage directly with your brand content and helps you to deal with customer concerns, increase customer satisfaction and build loyalty. And not to mention, it’s one area that small businesses can compete in with big corporations without draining their budget.
The first step for your business is to set up profiles on all social media platforms that are relevant to your business. A restaurant might want to primarily target Facebook and Instagram, for example, because that’s where people go to look for food options.
Next, start creating eye-catching and interesting content to attract people and post as much as and as regularly as you can. Your posts are likely to perform better if you add a relevant image or video to it. In fact, 60 percent of people are more likely to click on a business that has images showing up in search results than one that does not.
Make it a point to engage with your followers create opportunities for discussions and exchange of opinions with intriguing questions, This or That posts, opinion polls and more. Also, use social media to alert your customers about special promotions and discounts, and portray your product in the best light possible.
It sounds like a lot of work but it doesn’t have to be. While you do have to post often and keep your content fresh and unique, it doesn’t mean you spend all your time creating and posting social media content. You can instead work smart and make use of online tools that can help you manage multiple social media processes in one place.
One example of such a tool is PosterMyWall. It is an online graphic design tool that lets you create stunning visuals for all your social media posts in just a matter of minutes by using any of the thousands of professionally designed templates available on the website. Everything from Facebook covers to Instagram videos to Pinterest graphics and much more is available in their gallery.
Moreover, once you have made the perfect design, you can easily use it on different platforms to get the most out of your content by creating multiple sizes in a single click with the free resize feature. Then, publish the design directly to your social profiles without even leaving the site. Or you can dedicate an afternoon to designing posts for the week and schedule them all at once with the Premium subscription, freeing you from the hassle of publishing again and again.
An end-to-end solution like PosterMyWall can really help you save time and money by integrating all parts of the social media process from content creation to distribution and cutting the need for any accompanying tools for social media management.
2. Conduct Online Advertising Campaigns
Promoting your company in more direct ways using a cost-effective advertising campaign is an option worth considering. For instance, running a brand awareness campaign on Facebook ads won’t cost you an arm and a leg and will let you reach a huge audience tailored to your needs, whether they follow you or not. Over 2.5 billion people use the platform every month which means that a creative ad campaign for a well-defined audience is likely to reach and convert a greater percentage of people.
Facebook ads has simple self-serve tools and plenty of Help topics to walk you through the entire process of creating an ad. You can use the campaign insights reports Facebook provides to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign and use the learnings to improve your reach next time. To ensure maximum engagement, make sure that your ad visuals are impactful and interesting enough to make your audience want to learn more. On top of that, they must also follow Facebook’s 20% text rule in order for your ad to run successfully. You can create eye-catching visuals yourself quickly and easily with ready-made Facebook ad templates and verify if the text percentage is acceptable for Facebook ads with this tool.
3. Unleash the Power of Content
A sure-fire way to get people to your site is to create and share useful content that will be of interest to your customers. If done well, content marketing can establish you as a subject matter expert in your industry and make you the go-to platform for information for your audience. As a bonus, it will also give you additional material to share across social media.
One study cited that more than 50% of consumers said reading blogs has an influence on whether they make a purchase or not, and 61% of consumers said they were more likely to buy from a company that provided custom content. Quality content will help you build trust amongst your audience and create brand authority.
Updating your blog on a regular basis with useful, long-form content, and sharing photographs of your products with helpful tips will help drive more customers to your website. To figure out what topics work best for your target audience, put yourself in their shoes and think about what pain points they have and how your business can help resolve them. To get some interesting ideas for blog posts, you can use this blog topic generator to help you out.
Don’t forget to make your blog posts easier to skim with high-quality visuals like blog headers and infographics. And as a final step, share that content across your social media profiles. Make it easy for your followers to directly share that content with their followers, thus extending the reach of your content.
4. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines
Your biggest goal as a business is to convert customers and the first step to do that is to get people to your website. One way of doing this is to ensure your business shows up in online searches and that too in the first few results on the first page of the results – no one is going to look further than the first page. In fact, the top 3 results get a total of 60% of the traffic.
It may seem difficult to ensure your website is in the top results but it is going to be worth the effort. Here are a few simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics you can use to improve your ranking on search engine result pages:
- Ensure your website is user-friendly, loads quickly and is responsive. Nothing drives customers away faster than a slow site or one that doesn’t load on mobile. Customers will return time and again to a website that speaks to them and is easy to navigate through. Search engines rate user-friendly sites higher than those that aren’t.
- Use an SEO plug-in with your site, such as Yoast for WordPress. This can help guide you in optimizing your pages for search engines.
- Create a blog that is genuinely insightful and relevant to your target audience and optimize it for SEO by including keywords with high search volumes.
- Next, try and get a high number of backlinks to your blog by sharing your posts with people who might find it useful and be interested in linking your content on their sites. SEO experts like Yoast have lots of link building ideas you can try out for your website.
Search Engine Optimization is a high value, low expense strategy that you can conduct on your own without paid services with easy online tools like Yoast to give your search engine results ranking a huge boost.
If you’re just getting started, you can even use relevant keywords to help generate your business name and find domains to get ahead from the beginning.
5. Harness the Power of Video
Another powerful tool in your marketing toolkit is video. It is continuing to grow in popularity and has fast become users’ favorite type of content 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands they support.
Most business owners hesitate to use video as a marketing weapon because it seems like a lot of investment. Video-making tools are difficult to master and professional video creators are expensive to hire, not to mention the creation process itself is very time-consuming.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. Using pre-produced videos from sites like PosterMyWall can enable you to create stunning and professional-looking video content for your social media platforms in a matter of minutes. If you’re ready to go all out, you can even customize 4K video templates for digital signage.
Video content is the wave of the future and instead of shying away from the investment, small business owners should hop on the trend with cost-cutting tools that can magnify their reach without breaking their budget.
6. Leverage Local Support
You might not be a big brand name yet but if there’s anything you can count on for support, it is your local community. Be involved in community activity by participating in fundraisers, sponsoring local sports teams, creating scholarships and internship opportunities for local students, being an active part of community festivals, and more.
Use these activities as an opportunity to build goodwill with the local people as well as to create lasting brand awareness among your audience with the use of branded marketing materials like event standees, event flyers and posters, giveaways and more. There are thousands of professional-looking templates available online that you can customize to create the marketing material you need to publicize sponsorships, partnerships and more. Simply personalize it with your logo, details, and graphics to make it on-brand.
Final Thoughts
Putting effort into an effective marketing campaign should be a high priority for any entrepreneur because that is how your amazing product will reach people and gain loyal customers. Using these 6 low-cost marketing strategies, you can get started on building lasting brand awareness so you can bring your business in the spotlight. Choosing tools that help maximize your efforts and minimize your spending, you can make an impact and create the brand authority you want for your business.