If you’re a new entrepreneur, the prospect of marketing might seem daunting. You might feel like you have a dichotomous choice: pay a lot for marketing expertise or try to go low-cost but risk effectiveness. If you don’t have much of a budget, it can be extremely difficult to find marketing techniques that you’re confident won’t waste your time. The following strategies are proven and tested by entrepreneurs across the world, so use any that you feel are appropriate to help give you confidence in constructing and implementing a low-cost marketing strategy.
Email List
Email marketing should be a key priority for any marketer, but one of the best things about it is that it can be very low cost. It’s a solid way to start to market your business, allowing you to work your way down the conversion funnel and make an entry into customer relationship management.
Writing an email isn’t too hard, you just need to put in the research. But make sure you email only when you have something to actually offer your potential customers, whether that’s high-quality content or some enticing offers. There are also lots of free email marketing tools that you can use which allow you to monitor how many leads your emails are getting so you can keep working on them. After all, there will always be room for improvement.
Search Engine Optimization
The good news is that Search Engine Optimization or SEO can be completely free if you do it properly. The bad news is that doing it properly can be a full-time job if you’re very serious. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and different strategies can fall in and out of fashion, so expect to do a lot of learning if you want to do your own SEO. It can be well worth it, however, giving you increased organic traffic and placing you at the top of the search engine results page.
SEO work can include fiddling about with the code of your site and writing content with the right number of keywords in it, but first you need to figure out what you’re doing right and what can be improved. An SEO audit is the best place to start and Review Mojo offer these for free.
Content Marketing
Another form of digital marketing, content marketing looks to draw organic traffic to your website. The basic premise is simple: you want people to be familiar with your brand and to get value from your offering to be drawn in to make a purchase. Hosting great content that people find useful and actually want to read can attract customers from all across the globe. It can take time to get right, however.Not everybody can produce content at the drop of a hat, but with a lot of practice you’ll be able to identify topics and generate content in good time. This is a marketing strategy that is more of a slow-burner, so if you choose to utilize content marketing (and almost all experts say you should), make sure you stick through it and don’t give up too quickly.
Local Networking
One of the most trusted marketing strategies is also the oldest — word of mouth. The more people that know about your brand and the more people that see it in a positive light, the more likely you are to benefit from word-of-mouth marketing. As a result, you should get to know your local community.There should be some networking events in your area so check out apps like Meetup to see if there are any existing groups that you can use for networking.
If networking doesn’t come easy to you, don’t worry, most people don’t like it. Just think of the process as one of spreading the message. You’re not using people to further your company, you’re just letting people know about what you do, and if you meet some people that can help you, that’s an added bonus.
Referral Programs and Multi-Level Marketing
Multi-level marketing has unfairly received a bad rep because it looks like a pyramid scheme on the surface, but it’s not at all like that. It’s a strategy that encourages your distributors to recruit new distributors, but they don’t need to buy products up front like a pyramid scheme. A good multi-level marketing strategy is like a referral program.It’s not based on the number of people you have selling products; it’s based on the number of products that are being sold. If you can make a referral worth it for the referrer, you will enjoy this type of marketing as it requires lower effort.
