Choosing marketing channels wisely is a very important and tricky task. In the exciting world of digital marketing, you cannot be ignorant of the changes taking place in the world of marketing. As time passes by, you can see a lot of trends emerging. Being at par with these exciting changes can make your digital marketing journey enjoyable and fruitful.
There are endless marketing channels available to small businesses. Here are top inexpensive digital marketing channels for small businesses.
1. Social Media.
Using social media for business is really non-negotiable. 67% of consumers use social media for customer support, and 33% prefer using social media instead of the telephone. If people can’t find your business via social media, they will look for your competitors who are present on preferred social media channels.
The real question isn’t whether you should have active social media accounts, it’s how much time and resources you should be investing in growing your social audiences. For small businesses, it makes sense to invest heavily in organic social media growth.
Also Read: Who are the millennials and how should businesses market to them?
2. Blogging / Content Marketing.
One of the best ways to bring additional customers to your business is to provide them with new, original content on a regular basis. For best results, concentrate on publishing well-researched, thought-provoking and SEO-rich weekly blog entries. You may also want to create infographics, which provide information in a way that is more visually intriguing to users.
While it’s great to post blog entries and other content to your own website, you should also make efforts to make guest appearances on other blogs and websites. This will help build authority among both peers and customers while increasing your overall SEO rankings.
3. Email Marketing.
Email marketing can never let you down. According to a study, emails get 40 times more customers than social media marketing. What you have to remember here is that your email is an extension of the website of your business. Try to draft an email that has the same writing style and design as your website.
Emails should be nothing but interesting and they should please your prospects and existing customers. Don’t forget the CTA buttons. Give your email receivers what they want and clearly specify what you want from them. Keep your emails short, sweet, and to the point. If you have more information to share, write it down as a blog post and share the link in your email.
4. Video Marketing.
Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine. It is also the largest single social network (bigger than Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn combined). Written content still has got it, but video content is on the rise. Video ads experiment with search results by Google. Embed video content in the form of webinars, tutorials etc.
There are major search result opportunities in video marketing. But also, making videos has become so simple that anyone can do it. More importantly, there’s huge potential audience reach and social engagement from repurposing content from your blog as video content, and then embedding the videos in the original posts – and videos can be search optimized just like blog posts.
A good example of an online video maker that gives you everything you need to make high-quality professional video clips, royalty-free music, customizable video templates for your business is Promo.
Also Read: Top 10 Digital Marketing Agencies in Nigeria for Small Businesses.
5. Referral Marketing.
Referral marketing (also called Word-of-Mouth) is the holy grail of customer acquisition. Every professional service business depends, in varying degrees, on referrals. It usually has the highest ROI of all of your marketing channels, and routinely churns out the best customer leads. For some service-based businesses, referrals deliver enough customers to keep their businesses humming. For most, referrals are just a piece of your overall pie. Whatever your customer growth strategy is, referrals should be a leading part of it.
Conclusion.
All of these digital marketing channels work together, and conducting campaigns in these channels can be exciting, fun, and economical as well as tangibly rewarding. Organic marketing opportunities like these can yield more return on investment, and often cost you as little as nothing at all.
Can you think of any other marketing channels for small businesses that we overlooked? Please share with us in the comment section below.