Marketing campaigns can have a phenomenal effect on your business’s growth and reach, but they can also be costly. Certain types of advertising (especially PPC and social media-based) can quickly spiral out of control. Companies sometimes end up plowing ever-increasing amounts of money into adverts. Keeping budgets under control might seem difficult, but it’s essential for sustainable growth.
#1 Use analytics
Analytics help you to understand your audience. Crunching data on the age of your target market, their geographical location, interests, habits, and needs doesn’t just help you with targeting, but it saves money too. Blanket approaches to advertising rarely succeed, especially on social media platforms like Facebook, where laser focussed targeting is the norm. Understand your audience, and you can spend less money targeting smaller but more relevant groups.
This is true across all forms of marketing, and there are plenty of analytic tools available, not least from Google. Your campaigns will likely become more focussed as you go along, gathering data about what was successful, what wasn’t, and the type of customer you were able to attract. Rather than leaping straight in with an expansive campaign, it’s worth testing the waters, seeing what works, and understanding your customer base in rigorous detail. Only then can you develop truly bespoke strategies with big ROI.
#2 Use email marketing
Email marketing used to be one of the dominant forms, but it’s sometimes considered out of date in the world of social media and PPC. That couldn’t be further from the truth, though, and email advertising actually delivers one of the highest ROIs of any form. Moreover, it’s incredibly cheap to implement and can be fully automated, meaning that it’s time economical too. Newsletters, adverts, sponsorship, and lead nurturing emails are just a few of the potential opportunities.
Emails are important in the long term because they allow you to foster an ongoing relationship with your customers. Weekly newsletters and personalized, highly targeted mail drops encourage that all-important emotional connection. Email marketing is subtle. Using an email signature generator like rocketseed.com, companies develop a unique, fully-branded signature to appear at the end of every email. This can contain anything from social media links to contact details and can even be used to drive traffic to your website. Optimize your email and signature for mobile to ensure that they’re as accessible as possible.
#3 Use social media (but look for organic reach)
Advertising costs can be high on social media, but organic reach is still alive and still free. Organic reach simply means things like comments, likes, and shares – anything that helps your content reach a bigger audience for free. Most of the major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been stifling organic reach in favor of paid, but there’s still plenty to be eked out with the right strategy.
Boosting organic reach often means forming relationships with followers, producing content that’s sharply focused on your niche, and being extra engaging. Analyze your previous posts to work out what gets people liking and commenting, and pay special attention to shares. These are the holy grail of organic reach because they bring your content in front of new eyes. Keep a watch on social media trends and tap into them. No matter how you go about it, organic reach should always be your priority before paying for adverts.
Kidal Delonix is a contributor to Mr. Hoffman's blog. The views and opinions are entirely his/her own and may not reflect Mr Hoffman's views.
