No matter how strong your brand is or how big or small your company is digital marketing is not something to neglect. Sure, you can try several marketing options available if you have a sizable budget or an established brand. However, if you’re a company that is still starting and has a tight budget, you may find digital marketing challenging.

Despite this, know that digital marketing can be executed properly regardless of your budget. With the right skills, knowledge, and tools, you can absolutely come up with marketing strategies where you comfortably fit.

For many start-up companies, having a cost-effective and successful digital marketing strategy is critical. And if you’re one of them, you’ll surely find this article useful. Below, we’ll discuss the five most cost-effective modern marketing methods to incorporate into your campaign and engage with your target market.

PARTNERSHIPS

Should you have a nonexistent or restrictive budget for a marketing company, creating a partnership with other brands would be a huge help. Here, you won’t have to build a customer base from scratch, allowing you to reach those who are interested in your offers. In other words, you’re giving yourself a base that suits your brand by working with one or more businesses that offer products in the same genre.

Finding the right businesses to co-market is necessary. You should find one that’s not your direct competition but a complementary business. This means that their offers should just be related to your business and will appeal to your targets as well.

Co-marketing with a business allows you to bundle products and services. You can do this in the form of coupons, giveaways, in-store demonstrations, discounts, and other types of promotions. This is also a way of delivering additional products in your market that you can’t possibly provide, giving you a hassle-free revenue stream.

Other forms of partnership marketing you can consider are writing relevant content, creating a new product, promoting the brand for monetary reward, using retention techniques for loyal customers, or aligning with charitable organizations.

CONTENT UPGRADES

In case you’re not familiar with blog content upgrades, this relates to an article-specific piece that visitors can access in exchange for an email address. This works like a lead magnet, which can create sales leads as you’re offering them content to get their email addresses.

Created specifically for one blog, content upgrades can help generate higher conversion rates for your business. It needs to be highly relevant to the content piece’s topic that your target audience is already consuming. In other words, you are providing extra value for free. 

For instance, let’s say you are creating a blog post on how to repair a broken toilet for your readers. While this content piece might be interesting to read, adding a bonus video showing the actual way of fixing the toilet would make it more valuable. Plus, such a video is also highly relevant and specific to your article.

To help you ensure you’ll have an effective content upgrade, here are the other practices to take into account:

• It must be useful and actionable. So while the blog post shares the theory, the bonus content helps your targets take action.
• It should be integrated with an email marketing tool. This allows people to be automatically tagged and added to your list.
• Add calls to action within the body of the content piece. You can insert one in the middle and another on the last part.

There are also different types of content upgrades that you and your team can produce without spending too much money. These include a list of resources, PDF or hardcopy of the blog post, audio or video recording of a written article, quick start guide, printable copies, exclusive interviews, mini e-books, downloadable templates, and free courses or trials.

INFLUENCER OUTREACH

Another cost-effective strategy and a great alternative to traditional advertising is influencer outreach. The goal here is finding and connecting with someone who can promote your brand and deliver the right message to a great number of individuals.

Since the people already trust the opinions and insights coming from an influencer, you can expect that they can significantly influence your market. They can advertise your brand, convince people to listen, and eventually encourage them to purchase your product or service.

But what makes this marketing strategy effective? Well, the first thing that might come to your mind is that financial compensation is not the best tactic to have an influencer promote your business. Yes, it is easy, but the rate of celebrity endorsement can be pretty high too. Plus, most people are already aware of this and see these endorsements as insincere.

The better move is for you to build an authentic, professional relationship with an influencer who possesses the same goals as you. Finding someone who can be a loyal advocate may be a tedious process, but if executed properly, you can gain access to a large number of potential customers for your business.

At the same time, make sure to carefully think about what type of influencer you want to contact. Are you going for micro influencers with below two thousand followers, or are you looking to get celebrities with massive followings? Opt for the one that won’t exceed your budget.

Once you determined which influencer to reach out to, think about what you should ask from them. They can give a quote or paragraph for a comprehensive guide you’re writing, create an entire guest blog post for your brand, or like and share the content piece you’ll be posting.

Lastly, don’t forget to evaluate the process and check if it’s effective for your brand or not. Take note of these:

• The strategy may be unsuccessful if the influencer dislikes your certain approach or is not receptive to establishing a new relationship with you. If this happens, make sure to identify what went wrong.
• On the other hand, if you’ve met your goals with this strategy, like being interviewed on a popular podcast or creating a guest post for an influential blog, check its impact on your email list or traffic.

That said, assess what you’ve learned from this and check if there’s anything you should improve in the next influencer outreach campaign.

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

Connecting with existing and potential customers is a strategy that will always be crucial to marketing campaigns. Most people today use social media platforms for about two or more hours a day. This means that building a social media presence increases your chance of expanding your reach. If done correctly, you can use your social media channels to turn views into visits and appointments for your business.

Compared to traditional advertising, social media engagement is way more cost-effective. Just imagine how much it will cost your company to create, print, and hand out flyers to five thousand or over one hundred thousand people. As with social media engagement, you’ll be able to get way more shares and views than printed flyers could for a one-time cost.

Before you can benefit from such a campaign, listed below are some ways on how you can effectively utilize social media to engage with customers:

• When creating content and sharing it on social feeds, make sure you’re not just focusing on your brand but also on the topic itself.
• Share content or posts from others that are relevant to your audience. Providing additional information from other resources will keep your readers engaged and interested.
• Join relevant Q&A sessions and offer proper answers to queries. Doing so will allow you to be a helpful brand or a go-to seller.
• Creating polls and surveys is one easy way to get immediate customer feedback. You can use this to see what your targets need or prefer.
• Add images and videos to your posts and content. By making your posts more visually appealing, you can easily capture your audience’s attention and make them want to read it.
• Keep your social media accounts active by posting frequently. This enables you to maintain your following and attract more.
• Publish posts about issues and trends that are relevant to your industry, allowing you to show involvement and support, as well as strengthen your reputation.

OUTSOURCING

Particularly for small businesses, marketing a brand can be a very tough task. Outsourcing is one cost-effective strategy to consider if you have limited resources, experience, or staff to do a number of things. Can’t write a high-quality blog post? Work with a professional writer. Can’t manage your social media pages? Hire a social media specialist to do it for you. 

Here are some of the advantages of outsourcing your digital marketing efforts:

• Experienced digital marketers know the works, and you get access to their knowledge and skills. They know the best ways to achieve great results.
• You also get access to the latest marketing technologies that your company can’t afford yet, providing better execution for your campaigns.
• Get outside insights or innovation from the outsourced marketing professional. This gives you a new perspective on how to effectively approach marketing today.
• You won’t have to worry about annual leaves or vacations, which can be a cause of stress or delay for your marketing campaigns and production.
• You can concentrate on your business’s core and boost efficiency. Letting experts do the job saves you time and energy that you can use to take care of other essentials of the company.
• Outsourced marketing experts can guarantee outstanding results and ROI. This also means you don’t have to worry about your money going to waste.

Outsourcing may seem expensive, but it is actually a cheaper option. Paying on a freelance basis is more cost-effective than hiring permanent staff and paying for benefits and full-time salaries.

Hopefully, you now have a clear idea of what digital marketing methods fit in your business’s pockets. If you want to know more about the best and most cost-effective strategies, the professional marketing team of Feedback Systems would love to help you out!