Marketing your business effectively isn't cheap. To effectively market your business, experts say you should allocate at least 10-15% of your operating budget to marketing and growing your business.
But this news doesn't mean you have to break the bank just to generate business, either. Digital marketing is an option that doesn't come with the traditional media high price tag attached to it.
In the following 8 tips, , we're sharing ways to maximize your digital marketing budget.
Start taking notes. You're going to want to implement these into your strategy immediately.
1. Recycle Old Material
If you use email marketing as one of your strategies, take a look at how many people are opening the email. Rarely, if ever, will any company get a 100% open rate.
This means not everyone saw your content. Or say you posted something on social media around 9 am. Anyone logging in around 5 pm may not see what you posted. Especially if they didn't specifically visit your page.
There are also new customers to consider. They surely haven't seen the content you posted six months ago.
So go ahead and repost material you've already shared. Often, it can be just as relevant a year later. An example of this would be to repost content related to holidays or other recurring events that are important to your business.
This way, you always have good content to share that's going to be new to a significant portion of your customers.
2. Use Complimentary Strategies
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social media marketing go together like two peas in a pod. By coordinating the use of content themes and topics across channels, you can leverage your content to optimize the money spent on its creation by using it multiple times in multiple places and putting out a consistent message to followers and readers.
When you have a digital marketing budget, it makes sense to use these two similar strategies together. You'll get more mileage out of each dollar spent by, for example, posting a keyword-rich blog article on your website to support organic SEO, send an article synopsis and link in your outbound email newsletter, and post a teaser headline, photo, and article link on social media. This leverages your content-development efforts across multiple channels with overlapping but largely unique audiences.
You'll notice improved results with cohesive messaging across channels and your users will be more engaged.
3. Stick and Move
When developing a digital marketing strategy, you're going to find out that some strategies are more effective than others. This is ok.
The trick is to pay attention to the analytics and data. Review and analyze which strategies are working and which aren't.
Sometimes a strategy just needs a little tweaking to make it successful. Other times, it should be scrapped altogether. Knowing the difference requires experience. Here at Imagine That, we can help guide you to ensure your marketing budget is optimized.
That being said, no company makes perfect marketing decisions each time. Remember in the 1980s when Coca-Cola dropped their popular core brand soft drink to replace it with, "New Coke". It bombed spectacularly. Coca-Cola wisely and promptly scrapped New Coke and rebranded their original version as, "Coca-Cola Classic." Sales stopped plummeting and the company rebounded.
4. Manage Your Digital Marketing Budget With Social Media Advertising
Marketing on social media can be a dream come true. There are numerous advantages to adding social media to your overall digital marketing plan.
You can easily set up campaigns in advance to be sent exactly when you want them to reach their targeted audiences using the platforms themselves or social media tools like Hootsuite. Choosing social media platforms are important too - Facebook by far and away offers the largest reach, but Snapchat is favored among the teenage and young 20's set. Instagram has a large and growing following, and hashtags reign on this platform to grow audiences organically. LinkedIn is perfect for business to business marketing. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google - videos of all sorts are searched for and brands are found by those looking for a more immersive experience. And Twitter is the place for quick hit information for active followers.
It's becoming easier than ever to reach your exact target market using social media. Most sites allow you to select specific attributes you define by using everything from their ages to their interests and their geographic locations.
By using paid advertising on social media, you can make sure your marketing messages reaches the people that matter most to your business.
5. Work With Other Companies and Cross-Promote
Partnering with complimentary businesses is a great way to combine forces and make your digital marketing budget stretch even further. Could your restaurant partner with some of your food and liquor suppliers? How about a ski shop partnering with equipment and clothing brands. Shared video content, photos, blog articles, events, links, posts, and hashtags are all ways to build a community of complimentary businesses that support one another's mission and expands reach into each other's brands and followers.
By using each other's strengths, you can work together to create a digital marketing campaign that's highly successful.
6. Use Strong Visuals
One way to leverage your digital marketing budget is to enhance your marketing content by using strong visuals.
Although stock photos can be helpful for fill-in, it's ideal to create your own photo and video content. The possibilities for image graphics are endless, either on their own in the form of infographics or memes, or on top of a strong photo.
Video, especially, drives engagement with your users. With video, you can demonstrate how products work, share customer testimonials, provide tutorials, and show your brand personality through by putting your team members and customers on camera. This can support your overall marketing performance, as it encourages users to spend more time on your website, social media pages including YouTube, and create an opportunity for true interaction with your customers.
Consider shooting funny videos or use live video where you answer questions about your product or services, including the use of . Video content is projected to be 80% of all consumer traffic by 2019, so it should absolutely be part of every company's digital marketing strategy.
7. Create Interesting Headlines
Without eye-catching headlines, news outlets would struggle to get audiences to watch their newscasts, videos, or read their articles.
You're wasting a lot of your digital marketing budget if you're creating content that features boring headlines.
Grab people's attention.
Make your readers want to read your article and spend time on your website. Start by figuring out what articles and content your customers want by perusing comments on social media, questions to customer service, and feedback through any other means you have to listen to your customers.
8. Trust the Experts
If you truly want to maximize your digital marketing budget, it may be overwhelming to try to do it all by yourself. Keeping up with all the latest changes in digital marketing is a full-time job.
The friendly experts here at Imagine That can help you maximize your marketing budget. Contact us today for a free, no obligation consultation, and let us help put you on the right track for digital marketing success.