For many small business, marketing is both vital to get new clients and one of those areas where budget and time cuts are more likely to happen. It is understandable that when choosing where to spend money, a salesman salary will rank higher than AdWords budget. However, there are many ways small business can optimize the time and money spent on online marketing.
Choosing where to advertise
The best way of reducing the cost and time spent on marketing is selecting where to spend them. Optimizing your marketing campaigns to target the networks and websites your target audience is most likely to visit can reduce both the money and the time required to manage them. Measure the results of each marketing channel and don’t be afraid to stop using those that don’t sell you the right amount of good quality traffic.
Try using Social Media
Social Media Marketing can be extremely valuable to engage with your customers, current and potential. It’s also relatively cheap, since you can create an account in Twitter or even a fan page in Facebook with just a bit of technical knowledge. The only thing those channels will require of you is time to interact with your audience, a general understanding of how people communicate there and maybe a few dollars a month for a subscription to an automation tool that will make your life easier.
... But not too much
Social Media can be great, but can also be expensive in terms of time. Spending hours in Twitter talking about your company doesn’t mean that your sales will increase exponentially. Most experts in Social Media will tell you that while Social Media is great to create brand awareness, it may not reflect so much into sales. Even if you decide to give it a try, make sure to target social networks which your audience already visits. If your target audience doesn’t use Facebook, creating a fan page there won’t help as much as actually participating on forums about your niche. This may be specially true for business to business sales, who often have professional forums for each industry.
Invest in long term and passive marketing streams
Even if a quick AdWords campaign may bring lots of traffic to your site, it can be costly and its benefits will fade as soon as the budget is spent. Instead, consider implementing some simple SEO techniques and starting a business blog full of information about your company, your products and your industry. The results may be slower, but once somebody has linked to you because your content is great or a Search Engine has decided your website is the place to go for information you will stay there without having to spend money on it continuously.
There’s many more creative ways of reducing your marketing budget and spending less time on it and more on other core business tasks such as selling. Depending on your industry and target audience some will work better than others. However, if you see that you spend too much time and money advertising your products you may want to consider hiring a professional marketing agency or consultant and totally forgetting about it. After all, the time you will be saving and professional results could very well offset the direct costs.
Source: www.helium.com
Author: Irene Lizarraga
Date: 12/10/2010