As a small business, it’s important to spend your marketing dollars wisely. Here are 5 tips to help reduce your digital marketing spend without compromising your results.
1. Create your content in-house
There are a lot of pros and cons to creating your content in-house. In-house content creation can help you maintain a consistent voice and tone, and ensure that all content is aligned with your company’s goals and values. Who better than one of your own to tell the world how great your products or services are? However, in-house content creation is time-consuming.
When doing content creation in-house in order to keep your digital marketing spend low, please keep the following in mind:
You need to appoint someone in your company to be ultimately responsible for tracking and overseeing your digital marketing campaigns. This will take time away from their other work, but it is important to have someone in charge of this to ensure that your campaigns are successful.
You will need to find someone who is good at communicating and is willing to learn about digital marketing, and another person who will be responsible for creating visual content like photos and videos. Tools like Canva are a great help in turning consistently professional visual content – even for the not-so-professional designers.
(cost: depends on the number of hours dedicated to digital marketing)
2. Reach out to old customers to get more online reviews
Search engines love reviews, and they cost nothing!
Not only do search engines love reviews, but they cost nothing! An online review is a great way to get feedback about your brand and to show potential and current customers what others are saying about you. Positive reviews help attract new customers – and that’s the name of the game, isn’t it? By monitoring your online reviews, you can ensure that your brand is being represented in the best light possible and signal search engines that they should pay more attention to your business.
When it comes to online reviews, one of the best ways to get more is to reach out to your old customers. They’re more likely to be happy with your product or service, so they’re more likely to leave a review. Plus, they’re already familiar with your company, so they won’t need as much information to write a review.
To reach out to your old customers, send them an email letting them know about your new online review system.
(cost: free)
3. Use AI tools to create content and improve conversion
Another way to keep your digital marketing spend in check is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. These can help you create Facebook or Google Ads faster and can automatically select the better performing ones to display. Rather than have a human sifting through all the data, companies at the beginning of their digital advertising journey can use these tools to get started. Unless you hire an expert to manage your ads, AI will probably create better converting ads than your employees, and is a great way for them to learn how to create high converting ads.
AI tools can help businesses see what is and isn’t working with their ads, and then make changes. Additionally, AI tools can help businesses find opportunities for growth and optimization.
(cost: free for most trials – real costs depends on tool and usage)
4. Expand your reach across other social media
If you want to expand your reach across other social media platforms, it’s important to first understand where your audience is spending their time. You wouldn’t do the same ad for Facebook and for TikTok. Once you’ve identified the platforms where your audience goes to, you can begin creating content that is tailored specifically for those channels.
For example, if you’re a business that sells shoes, you might create a series of short videos on Instagram that show people how to style different types of shoes in different ways.
Once you have familiared yourself with a new social media platform, see if running ads on it is beneficial (see point 1 and 2 above)
(cost: free)
5. Expand your reach by joining marketplaces and online platforms.
There are many marketplaces and online platforms where you can expand your reach by selling your products or services. Some of the most popular platforms include Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. These platforms offer a wide audience of potential buyers, and they provide a convenient way for customers to get accustomed to your brand and buy your products. Additionally, these platforms can help you build a brand and create a presence online.
That means that you’ll end up having more customers, more reviews, more social media engagement, more video testimonials, more mention of you brand. In short, this will accelerate your digital marketing efforts and expand your brand’s influence.
(cost: free to join but commission based -from 5% to 20%)
There are a plenty of ways for your team to start digital marketing and stake your business’s presence online. If you feel overwhelmed, let Digismart can help you make sense of it.