small business

Marketing your product nowadays has become a necessity even you have a different and useful product up your sleeves. Every company these days is making sure that they are allocating a significant amount of funds to their yearly marketing budgets. However, there are many firms that don’t have the luxury of a strong marketing budget. This generally includes new entrants and firms that have been running on a loss for considerable time periods.

So how can these firms carry out their marketing operations in a successful manner? Let’s talk about some marketing strategies that run on a “Low-cost, high reward” mechanism

• E-mail Marketing

You can set up an e-mail based campaign almost, free of cost. Yet e-mail marketing, till this day, remains one of the most trustworthy strategies, when it comes to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. However, there are some facets of the strategy that you need to carefully consider, if you are on a low budget.

Firstly, you have to work significantly on the content, not only to make it useful to the consumer but engaging as well. Therefore, drafting an e-mail campaign that is primarily based on written content won’t work. Your campaign needs to have a healthy mix of images, videos, and infographics, along with written texts.

Adding some Animation and Multimedia to your non-textual content has also proven to increase customer engagement, nowadays. Now let’s talk about two more elements that can have a positive impact on your e-mail campaign. The subject line: Generally it’s not an advisable practice to include click-bait based subjects for your e-mail.However, click-baits have a good potential of creating an initial spark of interest that drives a customer to open your e-mails in the first place. Using click-baits can be counter-productive if the customer finds the actual content to be irrelevant/ useless after relying on your click-bait and opening the e-mail. This may deter him from opening your e-mails in the future.

CTA: Having a CTA button is of prime importance, in case you are marketing on a lower budget.

That’s because you need to have a highly result-oriented marketing approach and provide your consumer with an explicit trajectory that he has to take after reading the e-mail.

• Referral Marketing:

Why does referral marketing work so well? Well, it’s plain and simple; a consumer would always have a higher faith in a product that is recommended by his friend/relative or a popular influencer, than the one he sees in an advertisement. The trust factor operates at the core of referral marketing. Another benefit of referral marketing is that it can be reused and compiled with other forms and channels of marketing as well. Let’s talk about the various ways in which you can leverage referral marketing for your business:

Referrals in website: This is something where individual referrals don’t work, as you have to cater to your overall audience. The best thing you can do in this scenario is to create a testimonials or customer reviews page where you can showcase video testimonials of your satisfied customers or important people related to your industry like CEOs, influencers etc.

Landing pages: Involving a video testimonial in a landing can provide the much-needed incentive for the viewer to click your CTA finally. In general its video testimonials from notable persons that work the most, but what if you don’t have them? Well, then you can always create a collage of video testimonials of a few of your clients and add the video with an exciting headline.

For example:” see what our ten satisfied customers say.”

• Free Seminars/Webinars:

Holding a free seminar/webinar is a great platform to showcase your brand, to genuine and interested customers. However, there is something that you mandatorily have to keep in mind while holding such events. You should never resort to an explicit promotion of your company, products/ services. It’s always that a potential lead of yours would sign up to such events in order to learn something new regarding the respective industry or field where you are operating. You should see to it that the potential lead can take home something new after attending your seminar/webinar.

If you can achieve this, then there is almost certain that you have implicitly promoted your offering and your brand. Finally, hosting seminars and webinars would also enhance your current e-mail database with quality leads that you can add into different segments.

You can later target these segments with separate campaigns with the help of your e-mail marketing software.

Wrapping Up… 

What you need to realize is that creating quality and useful content for your target customers stands at the core of all these strategies. If you fail to create quality content, then there’s a very meagre chance that these strategies would be able to help you with your marketing goals.

Author Bio- Hi There, I am Shaun Williams, a content writer with Goodfirms, a research platform for Cloud Computing and Translation services companies, among many others. I enjoy communicating ideas and knowledge creatively and also ensure that the readers never suffer from boredom while reading my posts.

As technology evolved, so did modes of marketing. Gone are the days when marketing was limited only to traditional means, such as print and broadcasting. Especially with more businesses joining in the digital space, more modern and digital-based types of marketing also came to light, one of which is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing works much in the same way a performance or incentive-based program does. A pay, incentive, or commission is given to an affiliate for marketing the goods and services of a particular company. This type of marketing has worked wonders for numerous businesses, and it can work for you, too. Here’s how:

1. Affiliate Marketing Is Cost-Effective

Marketing strategies are, without a doubt, expensive. However, you cannot forego these strategies either as they are an integral part of any business. If you want to succeed in the competition, you have to go through marketing activities that can help promote your business better. The good news with affiliate marketing is that you get to enjoy a more cost-effective means of marketing. In the long run, this means less fixed expenses, which can result in a higher profit margin.

With affiliate marketing, your expense becomes variable. Other modes of marketing such as TV advertisements require you to pay a fixed price regularly. When the term or contract expires, you’ll have to pay for an additional expense. In affiliate marketing, the mode of payment is a little bit different. In most cases, the contract stipulates that payment will be made on a commission basis. This means that the affiliate partner will only be paid once sales have been made due to their efforts.

2. Affiliate Marketing Can Widen Your Current Audience Reach

When you choose to go the affiliate marketing route, you’re working with affiliates who are well-known in their respective niches. Hence, when you partner with and work with these affiliates, your current audience base will broaden. These affiliates already have a strong presence on their respective websites or blogs. When they start promoting your products and services, more visitors will be coming to your website as well.

Forming partnerships with these affiliates exposes you to an audience and a market that you have yet to penetrate. In ecommerce, the wider your audience base, the higher the profit rates as well.

3. Affiliate Marketing Allows Your Business To Be More Time-Efficient

Efficiency is one of the best secrets to financial success. One cannot emphasize enough the numerous benefits that a business can gain from having an efficient system in place. When you’re wasting time, you’re wasting the efforts of employees who could’ve done something more productive or profit-earning. This also means that you’re paying for their salaries without experiencing the expected and desired results.

With affiliate marketing, you’re more efficient, and your whole team also profits. You don’t have to focus on looking for potential markets to penetrate as your affiliate does this for you. All you have to do is send out your products and services to these affiliates and they will take care of marketing it to their audience. In this manner, the effort of your team can be redirected to other more pertinent activities of the business that can result in earning more profit.

4. Affiliate Marketing Can Improve Your Reputation

When you’ve been in the business for a long time now, you’d know the importance of having a good reputation. Clients and the general public are more inclined to trust businesses that have a good reputation.  Especially in industries where the competition is stiff, you can’t afford to take chances. This is where the benefits of affiliate marketing comes in as it’s also advantageous in improving your business’ and brand’s reputation.

Individuals who work as affiliates are generally viewed as trustworthy figures in their respective niches. This means that they’ve already built good rapport with their audience and followers. When they promote a product or service, their viewers tend to immediately look at this product or service as credible, thus influencing their buying decision. Hence, through your affiliate, your whole reputation as a business also improves.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing has numerous financial benefits for your business and those that have been mentioned above are but a few of them. Plus, you can also rely on it not just being effective, but having low risk as well. When marketing efforts are adequately shared between you as the business and the affiliate, the returns and results are better. Hence, affiliate marketing is a strategy that you should try today.