In order to become a master at advertising, you need to find a way to balance between an effective outreach and a frugal marketing strategy. Sure, placing billboards all over town, paying for TV commercials, starting an aggressive YouTube campaign, and investing in PPC is great but how much does the combined cost of this amount to.
In other words, if you aim to become a master at advertising, you need to learn how to get the most effective for the least money investment. As you might have guessed, this is a question that’s nearly impossible to give a straight answer to. Nonetheless, here are several suggestions and tips that might help you out.
Table of Contents
Content marketing
The first issue that deserves your full and undivided attention is the issue of content marketing which is the main technique through which you achieve identity, consistency, and generate value for your audience prior to purchase.
For this to work, you need to pick adequate topics, as well as employ efficient content writers or become one yourself. Before you commit to this task, keep in mind that, in order to achieve the adequate quality of content, you need to dedicate enough time to each post. In fact, the average time for writing a blog post in 2017 was 3 hours and 20 minutes. So, if you make an estimate that this is not something you can match, it might be for the best to find someone else for this task.
Instructional videos
Another way of generating value comes through instructional videos, guides and walkthroughs. The edge you can gain here lies in knowing the downsides of your competitors.
Some guidelines take too long to get to the point, others skip important parts, seeing as how they deem them too simple to even ponder on (when in truth), this might be the core of a problem. The voice and personality of the narrator or a person doing a demonstration are also quite important, which is why you need to think this through before you start recording.
Reddit and Quora
When in doubt, most people turn to peers rather than customer support. Why? Well, for several reasons actually. First of all, customer support usually has an agenda in turns of creating return customers.
Second, people are less afraid of appearing ignorant or clumsy in front of anonymous peers than representatives of a company whose services they might employ again in the future. Finally, here, they feel a sense of community so attending these might give you a clue of what your audience actually expects from you.
Banners and signs
It would be foolish to neglect the importance of the physical aspect of your marketing especially in the early stages of your business. If aside from existing online, you also have a company headquarters or a retail store, you might want to consider decorating it with corporate markings.
For outdoor decoration of the premises and the surroundings, there’s nothing quite like Banner mesh. The material is durable and formidable, which means that you can take it down and reuse it again, should the need arise. In other words, you’re investing in something that will be with you in ages to come (more like an asset or resource than a promotional material in a traditional sense).
Promotional products
Next, it’s only natural that we carry on talking about the means of traditional marketing. Here, what we have in mind are promotional products. Several times over, we talked about generating value and this is the most direct way to do so. By giving someone a t – shirt with the logo of your company of it, you’re giving them a clothing item that they’re bound to use. They can wear it while cleaning their home, at the gym or give it to someone who was caught in the rain. Either way, hats, shirts and umbrellas are always welcomed wholeheartedly by your customers.
Social networks
Every business needs presence in the digital world, specifically on social networks. LinkedIn is the spot at which you need to start your journey, yet, you also need to be represented on other platforms, as well. It goes without saying that you need Facebook and Twitter, which, is nowadays treated more like a news medium than a social network. You also need Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat for advertising and product showcasing. Speaking of which, you also need an official YouTube channel, where you’re going to post all of that, as well as the above – discussed promotional videos.
Micro-influencers
The next thing, you need to take into consideration are influencers and the way to make this business promotion technique more efficient. First of all, you need to change your perception of what an influencer actually is.
This is not merely a person with a lot of followers, it’s a person with a big portion of your target audience amongst their followers. This brings us to the issue of micro – influencers, which are people with under 100,000 followers but with an audience that’s considered low – hanging – fruit by your analytics team.
Customer referral program
At the end of the day, some would suggest that you start turning your audience into brand ambassadors, yet, this is not something that can be done deliberately, at least not in a short time span.
Instead, you should try getting as close as you can to this trend by starting a customer referral program. The greatest difference between brand ambassadors and people hunting for referrals is in the fact that ambassadors do so out of conviction, while the latter does it for an immediate material benefit (in a form of a discount, points, or some other kind of a reward).
In conclusion
The reason why we picked the above – listed eight tips is due to the fact that each of them stands as completely unique within their own niche.
Good content marketing is not a replacement for promotional products, same as customer referrals, although similar, in a way, isn’t a replacement for influencers. To make the long story short, you need all of them. Fortunately, they can be seamlessly integrated into a larger whole and be made to work together towards the same goal.
