Business First Family Business, Accounting, Finance, Investing, Marketing And Management
You don’t need to spend a fortune to make your business profitable. We’ve all heard stories about people creating businesses out of their garage, starting from nothing and growing from there.
Truthfully, your business can do the same. With some ingenuity, computer skills, and customer relations, you can put your business on a track towards success—all for little cost, too. Here are 20 low-cost, high-reward tools to get you started on the right foot.
Affiliate Marketing
First and foremost, use business connections to your advantage. Affiliate marketing works on referrals, where your affiliates share your business with their followers and customers. Affiliate marketing software makes the whole process as easy as possible by helping you share referral links with affiliates, track statistics related to your affiliate strategy, and more. Best of all, affiliate marketing is incredibly low cost—you only pay whenever an affiliate makes a conversion.
Social Media Marketing
Maybe you want to get directly to the source. Digital social media marketing can be easily accomplished by a small team of employees—or even just one! It’s easy to get started marketing on Twitter, and you can begin developing a starter campaign in less than a day. With time, you can begin tracking your analytics and slowly improve the quality of your outreach.
Email Marketing
Getting into a customer’s inbox with email marketing is just another way to get to the source. Email retargeting is one of the most preferred methods used by professional marketers, as it allows them to get directly in touch with past and existing customers. It’s as simple as scrolling through a mailing list to determine which customers are right to reach out to. You could retarget them based on a past purchase, an upcoming deal, or simply to inform them of new product releases. Don’t let past customers go to waste!
Influencer Marketing
If you’re looking to stick with the performance marketing angle, influencer marketing campaigns are another way to go. When people first hear about affiliate marketing, their first thought runs to the likes of Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, James Charles, etc. But you don’t need a high-profile celebrity to create a successful influencer marketing campaign. Micro- and nano-influencers—accounts with 1,000 to 10,000 followers—can be essential to driving engagement with your brand.
The right influencer can refer your business to their followers, which could potentially lead to conversions. Best of all, similar to affiliate marketing, you’ll only pay whenever an influencer’s follower completes an action, whether that’s visiting your site, signing up for an email list, or making a purchase.
Content Management System (CMS)
Another exceptional tool to add to your arsenal is a content management system. Known colloquially as a CMS, they make life much, much easier for marketers. How? By managing your content schedule.
Whether you’re trying to track the stage in which a piece of content creation is in, when a piece of content will be uploaded, or whether or not content has been seen and edited by other internal departments, a CMS can handle all of it.
It might not sound too fancy, but it’s essential for your business. Stop with the incessant emails back and forth, the struggles of determining who is working on what and when something will be ready. Instead, get a system that saves you time and puts all of that information right at your fingertips.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the simplest ways for a business to drive organic traffic to their website, all for little cost. By simply hiring an SEO specialist, your company can effectively onboard a researcher who can improve the SEO of your website. This can include updating old blogs, landing pages, and more. Certainly, small business site optimization is a great strategy to implement at your company.
Podcasting
Podcasting has become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason, especially among businesses. People like having an audio tool they can listen to and learn from in their free time, either while washing the dishes, exercising, or doing their laundry.
Your company can start a podcast in no time, creating a simple radio-like show that allows you to share your expertise with customers, all the while getting the attention of more consumers in your niche.
YouTube Video Creation
Similar to podcasting, YouTube can go a long way, especially if you’re creating educational content for consumers and fellow businesses alike.
All you need is a small set of marketers to team up to develop content for the internet. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy either! You can make content that’s humorous, educational, stylized, or a combination of the three. Anything that fits the tone of your brand and captures potential customers’ attention.
Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
You don’t need a massive marketing campaign to get a customer looking at your products. It could be as simple as having a well-written statement, getting them to click on a hyperlink, sign up for an email, or apply for a product trial. Calls-to-actions (CTAs) do just that, as they aim to influence a customer to complete a specific action.
Brand Ambassadors
Talking about performance marketing, you’d be remiss to look past brand ambassadors. They are a great and effective tool to be added to your company’s marketing strategy. Why? Because the traditional brand ambassador relationship works on a series of helping hands.
The most common brand ambassador relationship relies on a company providing free products and services to a trusted customer, who in turn promotes the company’s products to their friends, family, coworkers, and followers. For little to no cost, you can utilize ambassadors to promote your product in a purely authentic way.
Get Involved In Your Community
One of the most simple ways to improve the success of your business is to engage with others. That can be as easy as interacting in the businesses, customers, and organizations that make up your business’s industry. These can include fellow companies in your region, holding conferences for your industry, doing one-on-one customer relations across the country, and more.
Whatever tool you decide to use, it can be put towards improving the success of your business. Unsure where to start? Combine a number of the above to draft a profitable marketing strategy.
