Digital marketing is substantially cheaper than the offline equivalent. It also has the benefit of being potentially far more focused on the right target group or demographic that your business is aimed towards. This has the potential to be both lucrative and lower the cost of customer acquisition too.
Frugal digital marketing is clearly the way to go for your bootstrapping business. Here are some frugal ideas for how to market online without breaking the bank.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is an activity where you put forward some of the best ideas that your business has and shares them with an audience. The only difference is that rather than sharing them with your website’s readers directly, the thoughts are posted on another site.
Whilst the idea of posting some great content on another business website might be a little distressing to owners that don’t understand the benefits, we’re here to tell you that it can work well for your company.
What Are The Benefits?
The benefits of guest posting include:
• Brand recognition with a new audience
• Marketing the brand
• Indirectly encouraging curiosity in the readers
• SEO
The benefit from a search engine optimisation perspective is that the link from the other site to your own has a value for ranking better with Google, depending on the words included within the link.
Guest Posting Campaigns
A solid guest posting campaign includes the following elements:
1. Making a list of suitable websites that relate to your industry or business category
2. Researching the best contact information for each website
3. Creating an outreach email template
4. Sending out emails to each contact until the list is complete
5. Keeping a spreadsheet of who’s been emailed and what response, if any, has been received
The success rate with an outreach campaign tends to be in the single-digit percentage point up to around 20 percent. The higher success rate for an agreement to publish a guest post usually happens when taking the time to establish a business relationship first.
Traffic Leaking
Traffic leaking isn’t a term that everyone involved with marketing their business is familiar with. It is an umbrella term that includes several other strategies for driving new traffic to your website.
The idea with traffic leaking is that the owner of a website with no traffic goes to where their target customer is likely to be and gets traffic from there. How do they do this? The answer is by providing something of value. This will make the reader impressed by both the knowledge provided and the usefulness of the reply. Following this, a percentage of readers will follow a link to the website of the person who provided the information.
What Are The Benefits?
• Free traffic
• Reduces a reliance on Google organic search traffic
• Widens the reach of the brand to people who’ve previously never heard of it
Traffic Leaking Campaigns
A traffic leaking campaign includes the following elements:
1. Choose one or more sites / platforms to target
2. Verify whether you can post links to your website or not
3. Create a profile or account on that site/platform
4. Prove consistent, useful information on a regular basis
5. Add occasional links to your site
Traffic leaking campaigns work best either when targeting many websites, providing useful information and then moving on, or focusing on one major site at a time. The latter strategy tends to work best for long-term traffic generation because it builds a solid account on the site / platform with a history of providing useful information. Because of this, the account is less likely to get deleted.
Powerful Website
Creating a powerful website that impresses visitors and makes them want to work with the company or buy a product used to be difficult. When coding line-by-line, it took forever. Specialist web developers and programmers were needed to code up the difficult bits like shopping carts. However, there are now much easier ways to get a website for the business without it being expensive.
You can build your own Format website to promote your business, provide information, show product images, and sell through an online store. Setting up a site is now a turnkey process where you just select a suitable theme for the look of your site and make some customizations, and then the website is configured automatically for you. There is no waiting 8 weeks for completion; it is largely a push button process.
With the Format platform, it has been designed to let busy business people focus on running and expanding their business without having to fuss around with the technical side.
What Are The Benefits?
• Affordable
• Fast setup
• Simple customization of appearance and features
• Online store ready to go
• Quick image upload for products or galleries
Business Blog
A business blog is a useful way to extend the usefulness of a website. Blog posts can address frequently asked questions both about the business, its products or services. It’s a unique forum to let the business owner or staff address issues of concern with the company or the industry that is of interest to their customers.
What Are The Benefits?
• It provides a voice for the company
• You can share viewpoints separate from the sales pages
• You can address concerns or clear up any customer confusion
• You can provide updates on news events
For bonus points, if you see a question being asked on a forum or other site like Reddit that can be answered in a post, consider writing and publishing the post and then providing a link to it where the question was being asked.
Blog Writing Campaign
• Publishing weekly is a good frequency
• Offer a newsletter opt-in to email subscribers and web push notifications when a new blog post is published to notify readers
Answering Questions
Answering questions posted by people on a Q&A website has become a helpful way to promote the brand, to get noticed and provide useful information.
For every question posted, there are often many replies over the weeks and months that follow. In a form of crowd sourcing, visitors vote which answer was the most useful. This pushes the cream of the crop to the top, so usually the best answers are seen first. While occasionally the wrong answer is highlighted, usually they get outvoted quickly. So, most of the time the best answers are the most prominent.
With the way that sites like Quora.com work, if your business monitors the site for relevant questions relating to their industry, they can jump on them to provide an excellent answer. The better, more complete responses are likely to get the votes giving the company the best chance of reaching the top.
What Are The Benefits?
• Only uses a small amount of staff time
• Makes knowledgeable staff and the company look good
• Helps an audience of possible future customers
• More useful than posting articles links on a Twitter account
Question Answering Campaigns
All that’s required here is to monitor every day for new questions being posted that can be answered. It is also possible to batch this up and run some searches once a week. What’s important is the accuracy and usefulness of the reply; not necessarily being the first to answer. The more helpful and in-depth the answer, the better. Quality over speed is required here.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. It is possible to be frugal and still market your business online using a smart approach. Now, all you need is to get started on your frugal digital marketing strategy.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post about how small business owners can launch successful and frugal digital marketing campaigns.
Interested in more articles about affordable digital marketing?
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