Tips to Increase Your Online Marketing, NOT Your Online Marketing Budget

Now is the time for companies to be increasing online marketing, and there are plenty of ways to do that without increasing your online marketing budget!  Here are a few of my favorite things:

1. Get advice. There is nothing worse than investing money and seeing no return on it, but unfortunately, it happens to a lot of businesses.  The online marketing opportunities businesses have grow more each day as the internet continues to sprout new marketing mediums and strategies.  It is hard for businesses to keep up with it.  I recommend seeking the advice of experts who can point you in the right direction.  Thrive offers ecommerce consulting and emarketing consulting, and it is not free, but you can save thousands of dollars by getting educated on what works and what doesn’t work.  Let me give you an example.  Thrive recently consulted a new client that sells digital scrapbooking supplies.  They are a brand new business and have a small online marketing budget.  They have a well-developed website and blog, but had no idea how to get the best “bang for their buck” with their marketing dollars.  As a startup business, it is important for them to spend their marketing dollars wisely.  They had plenty of manpower (or womanpower in this case) also known as “time” to do marketing for themselves, but had a small budget.  They decided it would be best to get some advice before spending anything.  In 2 hours, Thrive’s team educated them on six different mediums that could be used to market their products for no extra cost (other than their time)!  So instead of spending $400 on a marketing campaign that may or may not work, they were able to learn about six mediums they could start using right away to see immediate results.

2. Get Social. Two years ago, the term social media didn’t exist.  We can thank our younger generations for wanting to be more connected because today there are well over 100 social media websites out there that offer businesses great opportunities for affordable promotion.  There are studies that show customers want to learn about who they are buying from, and social media helps with that need.  If you have the time, set up accounts with several social media websites (you can see a list of our favorite ones at the bottom of that page).   Two of my personal favorites are LinkedIn and Facebook.  If you don’t already have accounts on those two sites, go GET THEM NOW.  I bet you will be able to find many people you know already using them to promote their businesses.  If you don’t have the time, you might consider hiring a social networking / social media expert to manage your company’s accounts for you.  It is important to keep your profiles on these sites updated regularly.  Whenever you make a change to your profiles, these sites almost always give you a chance to broadcast your changes to the people connected with you.  Think of it as a chance to get your name in front of the eyes of your friends, partners and customers for a very low cost (notice I didn’t say free, that’s because your time is worth something).

3. Buy Marketing Packages. Ask your marketing partner if they offer any marketing packages, or deals that give you a higher value for the same dollar amount spent.  Often marketing companies will package services together because they can perform them more inexpensively if they are all done together.  For example, at Thrive, we package email marketing campaigns with an email ad design and offer a 33% discount on the ad design.  It makes sense because we can do the design in house and have it ready the next day.  The ad designs produced by our graphic design team are optimized for success!  The important thing to note here is that we can afford to offer this discount because a great deal of our cost is incurred by trying to get ads designed by others to work in our system.  Often, clients will provide us with an email ad they have designed that is not optimized for email marketing.  For example, the call to action may be weak or the ad may contain many phrases not to use in an email marketing campaign.

Every business is different.  Some things will work great for some products or services and very poorly for others.  We would love the opportunity to talk to you about the options your business has.  If you are interested, schedule a free, no pressure, no hassle consultation here.  The tips in this blog post are just a few of the many things businesses can do to increase online marketing without increasing their budgets.  Please stay tuned for more!