Although large corporations with massive budgets are renowned for their Internet marketing activities, it arguably takes more skill and expertise to promote your brand effectively with a limited budget.
Fortunately, it’s not impossible. It simply takes a little extra ingenuity and creativity, as well as a knack for what works with your target market.
Manoeuvring within a limited budget
You might ask: What constitutes a small or limited budget? Many analysts define a limited Internet marketing budget as less than $500 per month.
While your budget could be limited by your lack of faith in the ROI of digital marketing, it’s more likely due to financial constraints. If that’s the case, you don’t need to be sold on the importance of online marketing; you just need to know how to work with the resources you’ve got.
Helpful tips and tricks
Take a look at some of the best tips and tricks for low-budget online marketing:
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Get published on industry blogs. While you may not have the reputation needed to land articles in a major magazine or popular news site, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting guest articles published on niche industry websites or blogs. In fact, these might turn out to be even more powerful, because the audience is so specialized.
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Focus on social media. Social media is your best friend if you’re working on a budget. There are paid advertisement options on both Facebook and Twitter, of course, but you don’t have to use those tools to unlock the power of social networking. Check out Park View Legal’s Twitter profile. It has attracted nearly 5,600 followers simply by posting relevant and useful content on a regular basis.
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Start a blog. If you don’t already have a blog for your business, you’re behind the times. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but you should post a minimum of two to five entries per week. Quality is always better than quantity, but don’t underestimate the SEO and visibility benefits of regularly publishing content that’s attached to your name.
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Utilize promo codes. Most experts would agree that it’s wise to delegate at least a small portion of your budget to paid advertisements, since many small businesses with a limited Internet marketing footprint find paid traffic to be more reliable than organic traffic. However, if you can’t commit to spending money on pay-per-click ads, you should at least keep an eye out for free promos and deals. You can often snag some credits and run occasional ad campaigns at no cost.
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Recycle content. Did you write a really good blog or article last week? Then you need to maximize your best content by recycling it over and over again. While you don’t want to repost it repeatedly verbatim (you risk getting a duplicate content penalty then), you can always pull quotes and tweet them, or develop a blog series that analyzes individual components of the original post.
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Run contents. Looking for a way to spark up conversation regarding your brand? A social media contest can be just the thing. When done properly, a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram contest can increase social conversation about your products and services, and get people excited about what you’re offering. Even something as simple as an Instagram photo contest announcing you’ll be giving away a free product can be sufficient to drum up attention.
Don’t give up on Internet marketing
As you can see, useful Internet marketing is entirely possible on a limited budget. However, you have to know which pitfalls to avoid and what advice to heed.
Rest assured, the tips above fall into the latter category, and carry virtually no risk. Stay on top of new developments and make a commitment always to invest as much resources as you can in Internet marketing.
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