Creating an Affordable Digital Marketing Plan

The world of digital marketing is becoming increasingly apparent in today’s business world. In the recent years, this surfacing of digital marketing has caused marketing expenses to skyrocket, causing small businesses to be submerged in costs and unable to effectively compete in the marketplace. Social media, search marketing, email marketing… the list goes on. The truth is, these can all be very expensive for a small business.

The good news is that there are a number of affordable marketing tactics that small businesses can employ to help keep their heads above the competitive waters, and ultimately, succeed in the business world. Let’s talk about three small business marketing tactics that are both affordable and effective in today’s enterprise world.

Take Part in Social Media

While social media has been around for years, it has only recently grown into a viable digital marketing tool. Social media can be an enormous tool for small businesses, because it can be 100% free, plus it allows a business to see into the lives and needs of their audience, and cater to them accordingly.

Of course, there is a right and a wrong way to portray a business on social media, and sadly, a lot of business are executing on the latter. For social media to have a positive impact, a business much take hold of the “social” aspect of it. Contributing useful information to conversations can be a huge brand building and online marketing ploy for businesses of all sizes.

Start a Video Marketing Campaign

Video Marketing has recently leaped to the top of digital marketing tactics. Why? Well, if done yourself, it can be quite cheap. Plus, audiences love videos. Creating and posting informational videos on a website can create an enormous traffic driver to a website, but remember it is important to push out any digital marketing endeavors on social media.

Creating marketing videos can be quite easy. In fact, the hardest part might be coming up with the overall theme of the video. After deciding on what the video will be about, it is important to discover what video hosting website will work for the type of video being created. Here is a guide to point out the differences between video hosting websites. Overall, any business with a video camera and a computer can (and should) be trying their hand at video marketing.

Start a Blog

Blogging is one of the more underrated digital marketing tactics in the business world. I can almost confidently say that we have all heard someone claim that blogging is a “waste of time” or that it is “ineffective”. However, a website having genuinely useful on-site content is now one of Google’s biggest ranking factors.

There are a lot of reasons for a business to utilize a blog, but remember how we talked about using social media to gain a view of the audiences’ needs? This is the number one reason for a blog. If there is a commonly occurring issue around the industry, find out how to resolve this issue with your services and write up a blog post about it. Doing this will not only help raise awareness and trust behind a business, but will more than likely drive targeted search traffic directly to the website – coming from individuals looking for the answer to this issue.

Conclusion

Yes, digital marketing can be a bit expensive, but with a bit of creativity and invested time, there are a number of opportunities for a business to dive into the marketing world on even the tiniest of budgets.

Thank you for reading. Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments or on Twitter! What are some other cheap marketing tactics you use?