As a small business owner, you need to know how to promote your products or services to make more sales. And, if your company is quite new, or you’re working with a small budget, you’ll want to do this in a cost-effective way.
Fortunately, there are many inexpensive ways to promote your business. And, in this article, we’re going to break a few of them down.
Let’s get started.
Give PPC advertising a try
Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is a very cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website. You only have to pay for your ads when someone clicks on them, meaning it can be a great and inexpensive way to promote your business — when your PPC ads are working well, you’ll see a large return on your investment.
There are a lot of things you need to do in order to ensure that a PPC ad campaign is successful. To start, you need to prioritize your goals, and you’ll want to set these with your budget in mind. Are you looking to raise brand awareness? Get new clients? Encourage past customers to buy from you again? Having clear goals will make it easier for you to make a plan and assess how it’s going over time.
Keywords are what you use in order to determine where your ads appear in a PPC campaign. You can target generic short-tail keywords like “running shoes,” for example, or long-tail keywords like “running shoes for a marathon.” The keywords you target will help you target the exact type of person that you think is likely to click on your ad and buy your product or service!
To have a successful PPC campaign, you need to focus on a few quality keywords rather than as many as possible. And you need to ensure that the keywords you target are relevant to your website and give the viewer an indication of what the landing page they’re going to be transported to will be about. Incorporate the keywords that you find into compelling, relevant ad text to increase your click-through rate!
PPC ads can also help you generally raise awareness of your brand. Even people who see your ads but don’t click on them might be hearing about your company for the first time, making it more likely that they’ll shop with you in the future!
With professional PPC services offered by premier digital marketing firms like Sure Oak, there has never been a better time to consider pay-per-click advertising for your next campaign.
Provide referral incentives for your existing customers
If your past customers tell people they know how great your brand is, you can get more customers without having to spend as much money on advertising. And, if you’re working with a modest budget, this is a great way to promote your business.
To convince more of your customers to talk about your brand, consider providing referral incentives. This means that, when someone recommends your services to a friend or colleague and you get a sale, the referrer receives something in return.
There are a lot of different incentives you could provide to encourage referrals from your existing customers. For instance, you could offer rewards like store credit, bonus discount codes, or even free products!
Let’s take a look at a few companies that use this tactic for inspiration.
DoorDash, a food delivery service, has a great referral program to help them get more customers. New customers can use unique referral links from their friends and get DoorDash credits applied to their next order! Then, those customers can refer their friends for more credit, and so on. This is a great way for DoorDash to promote their business — their existing customers do the marketing for them!
Think about how you can incorporate referral credits into your strategy. Doing this will encourage your customers to send their friends and family your way, which is a strategy that won’t cost you any extra money.
DropBox, a cloud storage program, does something unique with their referral program. Existing Dropbox users can invite their friends to join but, instead of receiving credit, they get additional storage space! Not only does this help DropBox get more customers, but it encourages their existing customers to use their service more.
To promote your business, offer internal incentives to your customers in exchange for referrals. This is a cost-effective strategy that will encourage your customers to use your services more!
Focus on SEO to improve your search engine visibility
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an extremely important aspect of brand promotion. It involves using a variety of techniques that will help to make your website more visible on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO tends to be cost-effective because you can use a lot of SEO tactics yourself without having to pay any outside experts — this means you can get started for free.
A good SEO strategy should have three main elements: content marketing, link building, and technical SEO. Let’s break these down.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves tweaking and maintaining the technical aspects of a website in an effort to boost your search engine rankings. It helps a search engine properly crawl and index your site, determine what your website is about, work out how it’s structured, and if it will provide a good experience for the user.
Here are a few different ways you can improve your technical SEO:
- Have a fast-loading website (try to keep it under two seconds)
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
- Reduce your image file sizes
- Make sure your website is responsive
- Remove dead links
Implementing these tactics when managing your website will help you rank higher on the SERPs.
Link building
Link building is the process of acquiring links from other high-quality and authoritative websites. When this happens, Google will take it as a vote of confidence in your business and give you a boost on the SERPs as a result.
Here are a few different ways you can get backlinks:
- Guest post for other blogs in your niche
- Create content that people want to link back to
- Look for your search mentions online and ask for a link
To get started in SEMrush guest posting, reach out to other businesses in your niche. If they have blogs that cover topics in fields you’re knowledgeable in, ask if they would be willing to host an article of yours. In these articles, not only can you draw people into your website by showing your expertise, but you’ll usually have a place to plug your website. This is a very cost-effective strategy because again, you can do the work yourself and not have to hire additional workers.
You also need to create content that people would want to link back to and share with their audiences. Publish expert content on your blog! What topics do you know inside and out? What do people come to your business for over anyone else? If you can create top-notch content, people will want to share it, giving you a backlink.
Similarly, if you conduct original research and provide your readers with new findings, people will want to link back to you as the original source. This can be a time-consuming process, but one that’s worth it — it can help you promote your expertise and draw new people into your business.
Content marketing
Content marketing is the process of publishing articles, videos, infographics, and the like on your website in order to attract your ideal audience, earn their trust, and make more sales. It can help you educate your audience and target keywords in order to get more organic traffic to your website. Content marketing is also a very cost-effective way to draw in more traffic, as you can likely do much of it yourself!
To get started with content marketing, you should conduct keyword research. Head to a tool like Google Keyword Planner with a list of words and phrases related to your business. Plug them into the planner and Google will provide you with a series of keywords based on their competitiveness, or how hard they are to rank for, and their average monthly search volumes. When determining which keywords to target in your content, you need to find a balance. You want to reach as many people as possible, but you don’t want them to be so competitive that you don’t stand a chance of ranking.
These keywords can help you come up with topics for content marketing! Once you know what people are searching for, you can use this knowledge to put together some ideas. Are there common questions or pain points? Are there certain subjects that people are researching when getting started in your niche? Looking out for indications of this can help you come up with effective topics for content marketing.
You need to ensure you only target the most relevant keywords with each piece of content you write. And, weave them into your headers, titles, and body copy where it’s natural. Additionally, you should try to get your primary keyword into the first 100-150 words of your article to give Google more context as to what your webpage is about.
If you need some help with managing your strategy, check out the SEO templates offered by Loganix. We have content brief templates, keyword research templates, and more that can help you expedite your processes.
Invest time and energy into content marketing
As we’ve established, content marketing is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. And, you need to ensure that you’re creating content that your audiences are looking for through search engines, as this will help you bring more people to your website and grow your business.
You can also create content based on common customer questions. Start by checking in with your customer service team to see if there are any questions they frequently get asked. Basing your content on these can help you draw in more traffic, as people looking for the answers might search for them online and come across your web page in the process. This is a cost-effective way to promote your business because you can do it yourself without having to spend extra money.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of businesses with great content for inspiration.
Joy Organics, a company that specialises in organic CBD products, has great content on its blog, including their article on nano CBD oil. The article outlines what nano CBD oil is, how it’s produced, its benefits, and more. It’s a great piece of content because it incorporates keywords, educates the reader on a relevant topic, and answers common customer questions. Additionally, because Joy Organics sells CBD oil, the article is a great promotional tool.
For your own website, think about how you can draw the right people to your website by educating visitors. This will help people to learn more about your products or services, making it more likely that you’ll spend money with your business in the future.
Venngage, an online infographic maker, also has great content on its blog. For instance, their article on data visualization is very helpful for their target audience. The article introduces the reader to the topic and outlines how data visualization can help you better explain a concept and engage the reader. It’s a great piece of content marketing that’s thorough and shows that Venngage is an expert, making it great for promoting their design services.
To create your own content, think about what kinds of questions your ideal customers might have about your field of work. Addressing these questions in your content can help you draw in the right people and properly promote your business.
Aim to grow a strong social media presence
Social media is one of the most powerful tools you have for raising your brand awareness and generating leads. The more active you are on social media, the more people will hear about your business. And, the more people see your business, the more likely you’ll be top of mind when they next need products or services like yours.
To start, you need to choose which social media channels you want to use. You don’t want to spread yourself out too thin — choose a platform or two that you can manage easily. If you’re just looking for the largest possible user base, Facebook is your best bet. If you market to other professionals, LinkedIn is the obvious choice. If your business has a lot of visual components, like a restaurant or salon would, choose a visual platform like Pinterest, Instagram, or TikTok. Choosing the right platforms is a vital part of any social media strategy.
If you want to grow your follower count, you need to consistently post on the most suitable platforms. Try to aim for a few posts a week or, ideally, one a day. If you’re having trouble keeping up with posting, try to use a bulk scheduling tool! These can help you plan and schedule your content in advance. Many of these tools can provide you with analytics that will help you determine what content performs the best, what time of day you should post, and more. This is a much more cost-effective strategy than outsourcing the work to an external social media team!
If you want to know more about starting a business, you can find relevant information at newzealandcompanyformation.com.
Summary
Sometimes, you might need to conduct your marketing on a budget, but this doesn’t mean your strategy has to be less effective. In this article, we outlined several cost-effective ways you can promote your business, including through PPC advertising, content marketing, and more. There’s work to be done — get to it!
If you’re looking for more ways to stay up-to-date on business trends, take a look at the Warrington Worldwide business forum for the latest up-to-date business news!
Author bio & headshot:
Aaron Haynes is CEO and co-founder of Loganix. The company is an SEO fulfillment partner for digital marketing agencies and professionals, which provides the services businesses need to improve their online visibility and grow. If you liked this article, check out the Loganix blog, where you’ll find more SEO guides full of expert advice.
