Every year, marketing becomes more and more crowded with new tools, which can be quite difficult to understand. The cost of even small advertising agencies seems prohibitive for small businesses, and it is not clear what to invest in. What kind of advertising is sure to shoot? To successfully start with your business, it may be enough to have a small budget, or even zero. We tell you what tools you can use with a limited budget.
Create a strategy and calculate your budget
Start with goals: What does the business need right now? How much audience, sales, and profit do you want to generate? Then define your target audience – analyze the accounts of your nearest competitors, and think about who might need your products. Draw up one or more portraits of your customers: age, gender, income, geographic location, interests, pains, and channels of presence (social networks, media that customers read). Get real reviews of your product or product – the experts at UpReview can help with this.
Based on your goals and buyer portrait, choose your engagement channels, content types, advertising tools, and testing timelines. How much money do you need for content production and advertising setup? In order to understand the approximate prices, read the cases in your field: how much do your colleagues spend on advertising, and how much money do copywriters, taggers, and SMM managers charge? You can look this up on job sites. Interview your team: maybe you already have people on staff who can take good pictures or write, so you can save money on content.
Landing and SEO
When you start running ads, users will need to be led from different channels to one place to make a purchase. A good tool for this is a one-page website. You can build a landing page with the help of a developer or on your own. Make sure that the site is user-friendly: it’s easy to find the information you need and the “buy” button, the mobile version of the site is as functional as the web, and the pages are loaded without problems. Remember that 68% of all online activities start with a search query. And search engine optimization plays a big role in driving traffic to websites. Keywords boost search performance even better than paid search engine placement. To increase your site’s appeal to search engines, do an SEO audit.
Use videos
Reels on Instagram, videos on TikTok, and Youtube are some of the few sources of organic traffic left on social media. Marketers call short videos the most effective type of content. Algorithms suggest videos to users based on what they’ve watched and liked. If your video is useful and interesting to viewers, based on their likes, the algorithm will show it to the next group of users with similar interests.
Also, no one has canceled the popularity on YouTube of videos for “how to solve a specific problem” requests. For example, if you sell repair products, videos on how to glue wallpaper and whitewash a ceiling can be a quality touch to a customer. You will simultaneously solve the user’s problem, increase brand loyalty and trust, and demonstrate your products.
Paid social media promotion
Not free, but a proven tool is targeting advertising on social networks. Targeting is easier to set up than contextual advertising. To start promoting on Instagram, for example, you just need to click “promote” under any post, select the audience by gender, age and interests and determine the budget. Targeted advertising allows you to reach only your target audience by age, gender, interests, and geographic location. It’s also possible to show personalized layouts for different audience segments.