23 Jun Digital Marketing for Small Businesses with a Shoestring Budget in 2021
Let’s face it 2020 was a hard year and you did well just surviving the 2020 apocalypse. You can now add it to the list of recent disasters. Currently, many areas are just opening and it’s time to compete for the paydays, but how? Your finances were blasted by overheads, and you’re stuck with no marketing and pondering to yourself ‘how can I make impacting, coherent marketing campaigns for beans in the digital environment?
Facebook Community and Livestream Groups
Great news! Social media is your friend, and we will start with Facebook. Use your existing clients that have signed up to your business group to market to. Here you need to know that Facebook has an interesting algorithm that hides your content fairly quickly in the digital ether unless you live stream. Here each group member gets a notification on the top of their page, if you are aiming your offerings during lunch breaks you might get some new sales.
The good news is that to do this well all you need is an HD camera, an encoder that sends your live stream to a live stream provider and distributes the content to worldwide servers with one-touch connectivity. If you use bonded wireless for connectivity, it is highly likely that the picture will be great with no signal loss, lag or pixilation; Check out live streaming solution providers that prove both the hardware and a cloud-based hosting service that you can subscribe to. Livestreams are more immersive and therefore you get more interaction with viewers.
What to discuss? You can show existing offerings in use case scenarios, live events such as trade shows that you are already going to anyway and product launches. You could try and arrange interviews with customers with interesting stories about the product, conduct a question-and-answer session on key aspects of the products, and the list goes on.
A Google Analytics Review
In the world of business, metrics are king, to assess where you are and how far off you are from your targets. Google Analytics shows how your website is performing and it is a free tool for tracking your website traffic and user interaction. Google Analytics offers detailed information on the behaviour of your users, such as how visitors are using your website and what areas need tweaking. Check your click-funnels are working as they should and reduce waste; any money going into something that isn’t yielding results either needs tweaking or a complete overhaul.
Revalidate Customers
Hopefully, you are using a client relationship management (CRM) system that automatically flags product or service renewal times, and potential future products written down in the system from existing client conversations. If they bought the main product 6 months ago, do they need more of the consumable, and can that be supplied as a subscription service and not a one-off sale? If you are using a CRM, generate targeted marketing materials only for relevant clients at the reorder time. If you dump out content at random, you will get a lot of un-subscriptions.
Google Ads
Google ads is a streamlined marketing solution with metrics and settings galore. The challenge is that if you get only one setting wrong it will not yield results. Check that you are targeting the correct demographic, have listed under the right markets and not overpaying on click-per-advert.
The Future
You can see that marketing in 2021 will involve creative marketing practices and social media marketing. While you do this, try to generate content such as free-e-books and free downloadable digital content that requires an email address that you can market to; 2021 will be the year for improving your mailing lists and targeting approaches.
If you would like to speak with a professional to learn more please email Marcia Mohammed marcia@socialmd.ca
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