Increase Your Marketing ROI for Less Than You Spend On Coffee
As an executive, manager, or leader, a down economy is a scary place. It’s a time to be prudent and cut costs. Marketing often looks like an attractive budget to cut when times look bad. However, if you stop reaching new customers, your business could easily snowball into even further economic trouble. Many business experts recommend increasing marketing during a down economy to keep your company strong. When you’re busy cutting costs, that’s a hard thing to do. What you need is a way to increase marketing exposure without hurting your bottom line. Fortunately, there are some effective, low cost options available to you.
1. Start a company blog
Investment: Free with open source CMS such as WordPress, Movable Type or free hosted services such as Tumblr or Posterous
How it works: Building an active blog into your company website has many marketing benefits, from helping you establish credibility to search engine
recognition and ranking of your corporate site. Through a blog, you can talk to your customers and prospects every day about company events, product/service releases, industry insights, and company specials. You can also gain valuable feedback from your customers through comments they leave on your articles.
2. Send email marketing campaigns
Investment: Software costs around $20/mo or you can pay as you go.
How It Works: Through marketing only with your existing customers or those who sign-up to receive your emails. Still, marketing to this group can go a long way toward building customer loyalty and introducing new products and services. If you’re still sending out printed newsletters, you could cut your marketing spending drastically by moving to email delivery. We offer a pay-per-recipient email marketing software
3. Provide demonstrations online
Investment: Paid software such as Glance ($20/mo ) or free messaging application Skype
How it works: You can cut down on travel costs and let your customers experience your product and service as fast as possible by using online demonstrations. When using these types of software, you can instantly follow up with customers and walk them through your business web sites, give them a guided Powerpoint presentation, or view secure documents/images, all without leaving your offices.
4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Investment: $25+ per month
How it works: Is it worth five cents to have a prospect look at your website and see what you have to offer? If o, it’s time to think about Internet marketing. Dollar
for dollar, nothing matches the return on investment that Internet Marketing can offer. Search Engine Advertising bring visitors that are searching for what you offer to your website. Statistics track where they came from, what they searched for, what pages they looked at, and how long they stayed. Plus, goal tracking allows you to pinpoint the results generated by every dollar you spend.
5. Offer A Free Resource
Investment: $0, only your time
How it works: Your business or organization has value. Share it! The blog post you you’re reading is one example of this approach. We’ve benefitted greatly from implementing cost effective online marketing strategies and now we’re sharing those ideas with you. Of course, most items on this list tie directly to what we
offer, and we hope you’ll allow us to partner with you to accomplish these ideas. However, we’ve also given you recommendations of software or services from other
companies and hopefully you’ve found this to be of more value than a simple sales brochure. We’ve had great success sharing free resources like these. Perhaps you can find ways to share what works for you. It not only provides a valuable resource to your customers and prospects, it also helps to build trust as you demonstrate your willingness to invest in your clients beyond the sale.
6. Keep Your Site Updated
Investment: A professional content management system (CMS) costs close to the same as the monthly hosting fee you’re already paying.
How it works: Now it’s time to get back to the basics. Your website is arguably the most important piece of marketing your company has. What’s on your site? Is it
current and can your visitors find what they need? Is there a clear action you want your visitors to take to purchase something or get in contact with you?
Creating a successful website is much easier when you use a professional cms system. A CMS allows you to edit your own content instead of relying on a web developer to do it for you. A CMS makes it much more likely your website will stay current, engaging and effective. We offer our clients NetSet CMS to keep their web sites updated.