Cost Effective Marketing Strategies.

Too many businesses look at their marketing budgets as an unnecessary and potentially costly exercise that will not be worth the effort or money spent on it.

This in fact could not be further from the truth and should actually be seen as a company investment, the outcome of which ultimately comes down to how well you are able to plan your marketing strategy and how quickly you can learn from results as you undertake it.

2. Executing Smart Marketing

Now that you have a robust marketing plan in place, you should have a very clear idea what you are marketing, to whom, where to find them, how much you are willing to spend and what your expectations are on the campaign. Now what? Well now you need to find the most cost-efficient channels to reach your expectation goals!

There are a multitude of channels on and offline that can be utilised to reach your target market, but there are some easy pickings to begin with that may be right under your nose and save you a lot of money in the process, here are some of those ideas:

Don’t forget your existing customers.

In an effort to reach out and try and appeal to new customers, why not start closer to home with your existing customer base. It’s an obvious thing to say, but in a desperate attempt to get a marketing campaign off the ground, many businesses overlook this idea. Why not start a marketing campaign that just looks to appeal to your existing customer base.

This could include:

• Existing customer only offers
• Follow-on services or products
• Up-sold products or upgrades
• Seasonal or relevant campaigns that you know your existing customers would want or need
• Remarketing campaigns, and the list goes on

But the idea is, that it is far easier to sell to someone that has already bought from you, than try and entice a new customer in.

Start with what you can do for free.

Rather than assuming that you have to plough your money straight into marketing, why not try some ideas that are free to you financially. Ideas such as:

• Writing and distributing great content
• Utilising your social media channels to their true potential
• Running networking and useful video conferencing courses

By brainstorming and coming up with some inventive ways to reach out to people, you’ll find some fantastically simple, yet cost-effective ways to promote yourself and your services to people willing to listen.

Referrals and partnerships.

Why not harness your existing business relationships properly to build stronger bonds with people that you know well. From customers to suppliers, from work colleagues to providers, why not look at these relationships as potential partnerships.

Look at these people as people that would be willing to fly your company flag for you, as people that would join forces with you for the good of the bigger picture and as people that would want to be part of a mutually beneficial partnership to promote each other’s businesses. This is a fantastic free way to generate more business and to get people right behind promoting and marketing your business for you.

What goes around..

Do not be afraid to give help, advice, trial services and products and more importantly your time (within reason), in order to either help someone that requires it, or to give guidance where its needed. You will be guaranteed that a little bit of good goes a long way in business.

3. Tracking & Improving your Marketing

The third and probably most important part of the three corner stones of a sound marketing strategy is to track what is going on from the second you decide to start a marketing campaign to the end. This will ensure that you have full visibility of how successful or not the campaign was and where it either went right or where it started to go wrong.

The key to tracking a marketing campaign is not to wait until the end either, it is to monitor the campaign, on or offline every second that you receive results or at the end of every day/week that your campaign is alive and kicking.

The idea is to then fold these results, good or bad, back into the campaign as quickly as possible in order to either capitalise on the wins and steer clear of the loses.

If you have any questions about your own business marketing strategy, would just like us to chat you through any of the points above or would like one of our creative team to give you a free brand audit, then please do get in touch with us at hello@boostbery.com