Substance and Style

    Five Cost Effective Marketing Moves That Are Worth Your Time

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    1. Focus on building relationships, providing excellent service, and getting word of mouth referrals. While there can be a cost to joining networking groups, it’s usually not high, and getting involved with your local business community in the real world always pays off.  There’s no denying that we live in the digital age and more and more business is moving online; you can’t afford to be left behind in the digital space. That said, people are craving human connection. They are sick of not having personalized service anymore. Being physically present in your community is a stand out move these days.
    2. Provide good content. Use your website and social media channels to educate and entertain your ideal customer base. Update frequently (but not so frequently as to annoy and alienate people), and make sure your content is relevant to your potential clients, particularly if they are in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.
    3. Create a social media strategy that makes sense for your overall marketing goals. Social media is free (at least for now; this post is written amidst rumors of paid verification coming on twitter), but it can be extremely time consuming. Make sure you’re posting consistently, but keep the larger picture of your business and marketing goals in mind rather than focusing entirely on social media growth. Cultivate relationships with your online followers and focus on building trust in your brand.
    4. Make sure you’re optimizing your website for search. Use good structure, update your content frequently, have relevant and useful information, and pepper in your keywords organically. Focus on quality and ease of use.
    5. Create an email marketing strategy. It can be daunting to get started with email, and it can also be uncomfortable for people who know how much they dislike spam in their own inboxes. The key to good email marketing is providing information that your contacts want to read. Make sure you’re segmenting your contacts and sending those segments emails that are relevant to them (discounts to loyal customers, educational materials to potential customers, etc.). You can start for free, but you’ll eventually need to pay for higher customization, better features, or more recipients. Just remember that email marketing, regardless of how flooded our inboxes are, brings an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent.