If you're a small fish in the pond that contains tons and tons of other big fishes and trying to grow, it can be hard, especially if there is no food for you.
If you bootstrap a business or start your venture with minimal cash, you might have high hopes, but limited things that you can do. For any business, to grow, you need to invest a good amount of money in generating leads and in marketing campaigns. These campaigns ultimately help you make more revenue.
- Customers changed their preferences.
TV people came to YouTube, radio people came to the podcast, and so on. When customers came online, so did the advertisers. Online marketing took off. To reach to customers online, businesses spend a good amount of paid ads. Large companies spend 6 to 10% of their revenue, while startups should invest around 12-20% of revenue in order to grow.
The best thing about digital marketing is that it gives you a variety of options to market your product without burning your budget. It also lets you laser target the people that are your potential target audience. Want to sell a news magazine, fine, you can laser target people who read magazines.
In growing your business, there are multiple areas you should consider investing in, some of them are:
- Making a social media presence :
Social Media plan is a must to have when you're initiating a marketing campaign. There are tons of social media platforms and websites that allow you to run make an account. Although, you should do thorough research about which platform would your business benefit most from.
Try posting often, being regular and answering customer questions as quick as you can. If you don't have enough time to create content for social media, you can pick someone from Fiverr to do it for you, or hire a social media management agency.
Play store is full of apps that you help you create, manage content for social media handles. You can try your hands on Canva, StoryArt to get started.
Another thing you should do is follow pages of people that are in the same industry as yours and regularly interacting with their pages. This brings attention and visibility to your page in return.
- SMM : One Platform at a Time
Small research or even thinking with keeping buyer persona in mind will tell you about where your audience is hanging out. You don't need to be on every social media platform out there.
Make your presence on the platform where your audience is hanging. When you limit the social media channels, you know how much content do you need to produce and you focus all your resources and efforts on it. This gives you the max output for your work.
It's always better to have a good presence on one platform rather than having no presence on 4 platforms. Once you do gain some followers and have enough resource, you can start focusing on other social media platforms.
- Paid Reach
Thanks to Facebook's new algorithm changes, you can't rely on the organic reach to grow your business anymore. You have to spend money in order to make it reach in front of your target audience.
Facebook does provide affordable advertising options which you can benefit from. Ideally, if your post is appearing in the news feed, it should be engaging as well, otherwise, you'll end up paying more.
Try to not promote the products from day 1. Start by building some audience. Boost posts or run ads for things that your audience cares about. If you offer good value, they'll take interest in your business.
- Subtle advertising is always better than ads that are easily identifiable.
Offer some sort of reward to people who're connecting with you. This can be a discount to the most active member, a giveaway, or anything that can be put as an incentive for people to be with your brand.
If your product and services are good, and you're rewarding your audience, you'll start getting recommended by them to their friends and family.
Don't miss a chance to ask your customers to leave a review on your page or profile, because more than 88% of customers consider reviews as a personal recommendation. Thereby, don't let your reviews section be empty.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the multiple forms of marketing that don't require you to put in loads of cash but still get you results. Content marketing works by adding more value to the user's life. This could be posting regular content like blog posts, videos, infographics, that your audience finds helpful.
Considered to be One of the most cost-effective methods, this can increase traffic towards your website if you target the right search phrases. You can also share that content on your social media profiles. Now, managing a blog is indeed a messy task. It may not require you to put a chunk of money, but it does require a lot of brain and effort. If you don't know about Search Engine Optimization or how to actually bring results, you might end up wasting your money on a blog.
If you either don't have the time or don't know how to bring profit from content marketing, it would be better to hire a blog management service that'll do everything for you.
- Email Marketing
Okay, you need your customer's email so you can promote your products more often, but what are they getting in return?
Incentives Boy, Incentive!
An Ebook, a course, a discount coupon?
Whatever it is, there needs to be a thing that acts as an incentive for people to give you access to their inbox. You can give a discount on the first purchase, or maybe a free trial of your product and so on.
People also buy list from other people. But, lists that are generated organically have more chance of conversion since they shared their information on their own, resulting in reduced sales resistance.
Email marketing is also one of the most cost-effective methods. Email marketing if done right can yield 400% ROI for the amount you invest, but if done wrong, it can get your company domain marked as spam which isn't a very nice thing to have.
Marketing is all experiments. You try a thing, learn from it. You learn what worked, what didn't work, and so on. The struggle is only until you find the thing that works for you. From that point onwards, you can keep rinse and repeat the process to generate profits.