You don’t need bottomless budgets to make digital marketing work. There are endless opportunities to reach your target market — many affordable and very accessible to businesses of all sizes, including small companies watching every penny.
To begin, you must master five fundamental strategies that will transform your digital presence.
Phase 1 of Digital Marketing on a Budget: The Fundamentals
1. Website optimization with baseline SEO: Since there are more than 8.5 billion Google searches a day, every business needs to spend effort on search engine optimization (SEO) — modifications to a website to increase the amount of quality traffic to it — so their target audience can find them.
Here are some SEO tips:
- Ensure the content on your website meets Google’s search criteria. Your site’s content should be current, unique and well-organized while being useful, reliable and compelling. Remember that Google states there’s “no magical word count target” for ranking purposes.
- Include links to other pages within your site that provide the user with helpful information and links to other websites that substantiate your content.
- Use high-quality images on your site and give descriptive alt text to the images.
- Provide users with a positive user experience.
- Set up a Google Search Console account to monitor your website’s performance.
- Avoid keyword stuffing, copying content from another site and distracting advertisements.
2. Digital advertising: One very affordable tool for small businesses is to promote their products and services on digital platforms. These include advertising options such as:
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
- Social media ads
- Display ads (banners, pop-ups, etc.) on other websites
- Mobile ads targeted for smartphones and tablets
Digital advertising allows for precise targeting – unlike traditional print, radio or TV advertising – allowing businesses to optimize their ad-spend and focus on users more likely to be interested in what they offer. You can also personalize ads and reach your audience when they actively search for entertainment, products or services online. You can also track digital marketing KPIs such as conversion and click-through rates to improve your campaigns.
The question we always get about digital ad campaigns is “how much do we need to spend?” The good news for small businesses is that there are digital advertising options suited for any budget; you can start an ad campaign on some platforms for as little as a couple hundred bucks a month. However, digital advertising should be viewed as a competition. You’re competing for audience attention with other advertisers as well as organic (non paid) content on each platform. A higher ad spend will ensure better placement and more frequent displays of your ads. So the key is finding the ad spend sweet spot that works for your budget and still yields a good return on ad spend (ROAS). For our small business clients, we generally recommend a minimum starting ad budget of $500 per month per platform (Google, Meta, LinkedIn, etc.), though we start to see better results between $1,000 and $2,000 per platform, per month. Local businesses and specialized businesses with very specific audiences can spend less and rely on very focused ad targeting. Bigger businesses with national audiences and broad demographic targeting will need to spend substantially more to effectively reach higher numbers of prospects across a larger geographic area. It really depends on the goals of the campaign and the target audience size.
3. Blogging: Blogging is a relevant marketing initiative and can be very effective for small- and medium-sized businesses. After all, you’re reading a blog right now! Fresh, high-quality website content will rank better with search engines and increase website traffic. A blog can build brand awareness and trust with your target audience. Businesses and company leaders can establish credibility by sharing thought leadership on their company blogs. Blog posts are also a great way to keep your website content updated and improve your site’s SEO (through the addition of relevant, timely, searchable content). Ultimately, the goal is to convert your company blog readers into customers, but the best way to do this is by creating helpful, insightful, non-salesy blog content. If your executive team is too busy to write thought leadership content for your blog, consider hiring a copywriter or a content marketing agency.
4. Social media campaigns: Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), X (formerly Twitter), YouTube and TikTok, offer another way for businesses on a budget to reach their target markets. Social media platforms evolve all the time to engage users and compete with other platforms, so marketing teams also need to shift their social media tactics in response. For example, engaging video content is an increasingly vital part of an effective social media mix on many platforms. Examples of sharing authentic content that adds value and builds organic traffic include quoting blog content, leveraging user-generated content and highlighting webinars. To get the best results, focus on the social channels where your target market is active. There’s no need to spend resources building content and a presence on a social channel if your prospective customers don’t use that channel.
5. Email marketing: Worldwide, billions of emails are sent and received daily. Email may seem old school, part of the O.G. digital marketing mix, but conversion rates from email remain high when compared to many other platforms. And once you’ve built a good email marketing list, sending email marketing campaigns is an incredibly cost-effective way to market your business. Best practices in email marketing include personalization (i.e., the recipient’s name in the subject line, as well as dynamic content catered to individual contacts), audience segmentation so you can send hyper-targeted messages, mobile-friendly emails (because most emails are now opened on a mobile device), and doing A/B testing on email elements such as subject lines to improve email performance.
Phase 2 of Digital Marketing on a Budget: Scale Your Campaigns
Once you have an established digital marketing foundation and consistently execute the five fundamentals discussed above, it’s time to take the next step to scale your campaigns.
While you should customize the specific strategies to your business goals, generally, you’ll want to:
Expand your digital advertising: In the foundational stage, most companies only dip their toe into the world of digital advertising. The next phase is to expand your digital advertising efforts to emerging or new-to-you platforms. Dig into the data to inform your advertising strategies and add more advertising budget to campaigns and channels that perform well.
Advanced SEO: An experienced marketing firm or SEO specialist can support more advanced SEO strategies, including building out topic clusters, internal linking, backlink strategies and more.
Automate: There are many marketing automation opportunities to leverage. You can use email automation to set up welcome, re-engagement, cart abandonment and cross-sell promotional campaigns. For example, when a customer browses on your website but doesn’t purchase, you can set up a campaign to send an email with a discount code. Or, you can develop a drip campaign that sends emails to nurture customers through the sales funnel and include automated email follow-ups.
Develop inbound lead generation: A more sophisticated digital marketing strategy includes inbound lead generation. These strategies include the sharing of various assets, such as optimized landing pages for specific offers and campaigns where leads can download ebooks/whitepapers with educational content on topics of interest to them.
Digital Marketing on a Budget: You Can Compete
You don’t have to have the biggest digital marketing budget to get results. Start with the fundamentals and expand from there as your resources grow.
We can discuss all the digital marketing options available and help you determine which ones you should prioritize based on your budget. Schedule a consultation with an expert from Campfire Digital today.
