Marketing Tactics That Work With Smaller Budgets

 New marketing strategies and channels are growing fast as our digital world evolves with each year. An entrepreneur on a limited marketing budget should first identify the best possible method and tactic for marketing. What in essence will deliver the most bang for the marketing dollar. The following marketing tactics are a great start for entrepreneurs wanting to create momentum for their brand.

Make Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a Marketing Priority

A company website is one of the most important tools if not "The" most important tool for a business. It is often, where potential customers get their first impression of a brand. SEO campaigns help brands drastically improve their website when done right. When optimizing a website for SEO campaigns, almost all aspects of a website are improved. Therefore, the website increases in quality. SEO campaigns are created to have a brand's website appear in the top search results of dominant Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing organically. This means, it is not shown in search through paid advertising, but in the organic search results. They are more trusted and yield a much greater click-through rate.

Google's free AdWords tool helps entrepreneurs identify what keyword phrases yield the most traffic online. Those should be considered for optimization and SEO, but competitiveness should be kept in mind. At times, smaller niche markets are easier and faster to reach. AdWords will be able to provide all those details for entrepreneurs.

Use Google Analytics Constantly to Gain Valuable Insights

Too often entrepreneurs fly blindly. This means, they do not really know what is happening to their website and marketing efforts. Without factual data, a business is not be able to measure their efforts. With Google Analytics and other third party tools, entrepreneurs can get quickly reports, statistics, and measurements of their marketing efforts.

Entrepreneurs must embrace tools such as Google Analytics to successfully launch and manage marketing campaigns. Even though there are many other tools, Google's Analytics and Webmaster Central are essential to online success and should be frequently utilized by website operators and entrepreneurs. Intelligence information is crucial to understanding once marketing efforts.

Content Marketing Campaigns Can Yield Great Results Online

Many entrepreneurs neglect the importance of content marketing efforts. Content marketing is one of the most beneficial marketing tactics, can be free or small investments, and the publishing and distribution is free as well on many websites. Entrepreneurs can create quality content, publish it, and distribute it with very small investments or free.

Content marketing is considered the creation of articles, blog articles, press releases, videos, and Images such as Infographics. Once created, they are uploaded, shared, and distributed across many channels such as Social Media.

It is a critical method of marketing, very results oriented, and also one of the least expansive techniques to market online.

Find Your Target Market Online and Join them

For a business or entrepreneur to have success through marketing, the target market should be identified, studied, and found online to join them. This means, a brand should become visible where the target market spends time at online. There are many third party tools that allow a brand to research articles, websites, news, and much more that is relevant to the brand. These are the places that the target market and potential customers are digitally speaking.

A business should become visible there as well, if it wants to have greater success rate with marketing efforts. There are third party tools that let a brand research based on keyword phrases, which websites are best. Such a tool that works great is called Link Prospector by Citation Labs.

Communicate with Your Key Customers

Once all the marketing and sales efforts have succeeded and a business has gotten customers, a brand must keep the customers (good) loyal. Not all customers are good customers, but the key customer relationships must be nurtured by a business.

Receiving valuable feedback, insights, and information from customers is invaluable to a brand's marketing efforts. Key customers can generate referrals, be a reference, provide testimonials, and much more. Opening up communication with customers can benefit a business in many ways.

These are 5 methods and tactics that entrepreneurs and organizations can utilize for successful marketing. All of them are free or very inexpensive and companies should put them to use to succeed with marketing campaigns.

When companies are not sure, one tactic that is often used is the consulting services of an expert. Marketing consulting services can greatly enhance an organizations ability to make better decisions with marketing and avoid costly mistakes.

Midsized Company Content Marketing

 Content marketing discussions among B2B, B2C and nonprofit marketers continue to take center stage. What tactics to use? What should the message be? And, does content marketing really work?

Some light has been shed on this by two recent studies conducted in 2012 and 2013 by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. The overwhelming majority of B2B marketers reported that in both years they employed content marketing and, further, that they used a wide range of different content marketing tactics:

• Social media (other than blogs) was used by 87% of marketers;
• Articles on their websites and Enewsletters were each were used by eight out of ten;
• In-person events and Blogs were used by three-quarters of marketers;
• Case studies, Videos and Articles on other websites were used by seven out of ten marketers;
• White papers were used by six out of ten, while about half used Webinars/webcasts;
• And, sixteen other tactics were employed by 10 to 44 percent of marketers.

Given the wide variety of tactics employed, it is not surprising that these marketers also reported using content marketing to achieve a number of different goals, chief among them - increasing brand awareness, customer acquisition, lead generation, customer retention and thought leadership.

So, while these studies confirm the popularity of content marketing (as do similar studies among B2C marketers), across many platforms and with a number of different goals, the key question still remains - what messages should you communicate through all of these tactics?

Understand Your Prospects And Customers With Market Research
With all of these opportunities to engage your customers and prospects, it strikes me that it would be prudent to fully understand their wants and needs in buying a product or service, as well as how these wants and needs are met by your brand and competitive brands.

Some marketers believe they understand their customers and hope they understand their prospects. But in today's cluttered world of information, facts trump opinion. Without the right message, all of your efforts in content marketing may be perceived as just noise - and sometimes a lot of noise - by your target audience. Not a very efficient way to spend your money or resources.

Therefore, before you spend your limited time and marketing communications dollars, wouldn't it be a lot smarter to learn directly from your audiences what they consider to be the most important to them in brand selection? Ask them what is most important to them - quality, reputation, price, distribution, delivery terms, manufacturing standards, reliability, eco-friendly, healthfulness, etc. Once you know this, and how these attributes are related to your brand and to competitive brands, you'll be able to align your strengths to competitive weakness to meet you buyers' needs.

In addition, this knowledge will also provide your employees with meaningful insights that will impact their relationships and dialogue with customers or prospects. And, as a bonus, the research you conduct for your content marketing efforts may lead to improved marketing and marketing communications across all of your programs.

Marketing Communications Consultants Or Internal Staff
Having the skills and time to develop your messaging, regardless of content tactic, is another issue to consider. Whether you use internal staff or external professionals, this type of research provides meaningful and specific direction on what to communicate to improve your ROI. Then the question becomes how to communicate this message.

Skilled professionals will not present the research findings as a blatant "brand speak" message. Rather, the objective should be to establish trust with your audiences through communications that meets their needs without a "hard sell".

So, as you continue your discussions of when, where and how to employ content marketing, I hope you will agree that meaningful messaging, coupled with the right content marketing tactic - be it as simple as a post on Facebook or as complex as an in-person event - can improve your reputation with existing customers and prospects.

Inbound Marketing And Outbound Marketing

 Today's consumer is much more informed and knowledgeable about the products and the brands that he/she would like to opt for. Therefore, as a brand, one has to be seen in the right places at the right time in order to be registered in an optimistic way in the minds of the consumers. This makes the brand, embrace different modes in order to have a holistic approach towards marketing. New avenues of marketing have cropped up in the recent past and the popularity of social media has revolutionized the way marketing gurus used to look at the concept of marketing in yester years. The field is much more dynamic and the end user or consumer is the driving force now. It is this demand of customer centricity that has given birth to different methods of marketing which are prevalent today. Inbound and outbound are two ways of marketing which ensures that a brand propagates its products and services to the customers.

What Is An Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a recent phenomenon and is popularly known as the method where brands help themselves to be spotted by customers through paid and search engine marketing efforts. This type encompasses the promotion of a company through blogs, podcasts, e-newsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, videos, e-books and other forms of content marketing, which proves worthwhile in bringing the customers nearer to the brand.

What Is An Outbound Marketing?

Contrary to the methods of inbound marketing, the activity of cold calling, attending seminars and trade shows, radio and television commercials, print advertisements, sales flyers, spamming, telemarketing and other means of traditional marketing are in the gamut of outbound marketing. In a nutshell, it can be defined as a traditional form of marketing in which company broadcasts its message to a target audience.

Benefits Of Inbound And Outbound Marketing

The key benefits of inbound marketing are:

• The increased probability of converting website visitors to leads
• It provides opportunity to convert customers into repeat high margin customers
• It is cost effective compared to outbound
• Customers come to the brand via inbound marketing rather than the brand having to reach out to the customers
• The marketers can educate their customers through inbound
• Easier to track and the ROI can be established effectively

The key benefits of outbound marketing are:

• It provides an opportunity for mass appeal
• Outbound marketing has a greater probability of lead generation as in this case one can humanize the approach for the prospects
• Helps in building a brand story

Conclusion

Marketing can be used as an effective tool for lead generation. Both inbound and outbound marketing can serve the purpose of lead generation. The organizations allocate 90% of their marketing spend on outbound marketing and only 10% is allotted to inbound marketing. This ratio has to change in the near future as the consumers today have migrated to the world of internet rather than being present on traditional channels.