Getting huge wins in digital marketing doesn’t always require a big budget.
As long as you understand your target audience and align your messaging with their needs, you could strike gold with your next marketing campaign. Of course, it also pays to have a cheat sheet of low-cost marketing ideas that any brand can execute with ease.
That’s exactly what this post is all about.
Check out some of the best ways to market an online business without spending big bucks:
1. Tap into employee advocacy
Here’s the deal: an average employee’s network has 10 times more reach than an average company. Not to mention that their posts are perceived as if they’re personal recommendations from friends.
If you aren’t leveraging employee advocacy, you’re missing out big time.
The good news is, launching an employee advocacy campaign takes little to nothing. Simply give your employees the go signal to share content about your company and its culture and you’re golden.
A specific strategy is to hold an “employee takeover” wherein employees are given the keys to a company’s official channels. They can post about a company lunch, event, or any team-building activity that their followers can find relatable.
Employees, of course, must be guided on what they can and can’t post. Be mindful of your target audience’s values and create posting guidelines that prevent employees from sharing anything potentially offensive or divisive.
To spur employee content creation, don’t forget to incentivize the process.
There are tons of free and budget-friendly employee recognition solutions for employee advocacy campaigns. Alternatively, you can come up with your own perks and bonuses for employees that excel as brand ambassadors.
2. Put stock in short-form videos
TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts—short-form videos are the new generation’s go-to content format. This is mainly because they fill the younger audience’s demand for bite-sized information and entertainment.
Short-form videos can be up to 2 minutes and 30 seconds long. That may not sound like much, but with a little creativity, that’s more than enough to convey your message.
Here are some short-form video ideas your online business can use:
- Product demos
- POV tutorials/hacks
- “Behind-the-scenes” company videos
- Events
- Customer success stories
Don’t have a high-budget video production crew?
Worry not—social media networks like TikTok and Instagram have easy-to-use tools to help brands create compelling video content. You can also enlist the help of a cost-effective social marketing agency to create professional-quality videos and animations.
3. Work with micro-influencers
Sure, paying a popular thought leader or influencer thousands of dollars to promote your brand should lead to a substantial spike in sales. After all, Gen Zers are tremendous fans of social media influencers.
But with the right approach, working with micro and even nano influencers could yield significant results. It probably won’t be as successful as working with mega influencers, but it should be enough to springboard your online business’s authority.
You can easily find small influencers through built-in social media search tools.
A simple hashtag, for example, will present you with a long list of potential influencers who can promote your brand for a small price. According to data from Influencer Marketing Hub, micro influencers with as many as 50,000 followers make only up to $500 per post.
4. Utilize user-generated content
User-generated content pertains to anything related to your brand that’s uploaded by other users. This includes customer reviews, star ratings, and testimonials posted on social media.
Featuring user-generated content on your official channels will help win your target audience’s trust. After all, positive user-generated content can prove that your brand can deliver the results they’re after.
Negative user-generated content, on the other hand, can be used for identifying potential improvement opportunities. Responding to negative feedback in a positive way will also benefit your brand image.
To take advantage of user-generated content, you need to convince users to upload them first.
A typical strategy is to automate a review request using an email marketing platform like MailChimp or SendInBlue. You can also make things more interesting with star rating or feedback emoji widgets that make the feedback process frictionless for users.
For online businesses that have been around for a while, you can use social media listening to search the web for existing mentions of your brand. This process can be simplified with the help of tools like Brand24 and Mention.com.
5. Target low-hanging fruit keywords
Some brands look at SEO or Search Engine Optimization as an expensive and time-consuming strategy.
There’s no doubt that SEO is a high-risk, high-reward, and high-cost commitment. But if you target “low-hanging fruit” keywords, you can grab quick wins without spending thousands of dollars on SEO.
Put simply, a low-hanging fruit keyword is a search term that your brand already ranks for near the first page. That means you don’t have to spend a lot of money to push your way to a top 10 spot and, in turn, generate loads of organic traffic.
For example, if you rank #15 for the keyword “carpet cleaning Oakville,” that’s a low-hanging fruit keyword for you. Building a couple of high-quality links for it should be enough to crack Google’s first page.
To utilize low-hanging fruit keywords, you need the right SEO tools to find and optimize for them.
The Ahrefs “Keyword Explorer” tool, for example, lets you identify keywords that you already rank for. At the same time, it can help you find great backlink sources for your SEO content through competitive analysis.
Bonus: More low-cost ways to elevate your online marketing
Want more ideas to skyrocket your online business without breaking the bank?
Here are a few more low-cost online marketing strategies for the road:
- Use content curation: Look for relevant content from authoritative sources and spread them through social media.
- Launch an affiliate marketing campaign: Offer to pay other marketers a commission for each sale they generate through affiliate links.
- Run a social media contest: Spark conversations around your brand through hashtag or caption contests.
- Don’t forget about offline marketing: Business cards, posters, and branded merchandise are still effective when it comes to marketing small brands.
Go for the gold
Excited to give the strategies above a shot?
There are truckloads of ways to promote an online business without a hefty budget. Hopefully, one of the tips above gave you the stroke of brilliance you need to accelerate online business growth.
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