Marketing is an essential part of any company, both large and small. Marketing can range from very expensive to completely free. How much you spend on marketing depends on many different factors such as time of year, size of the company, and many more. In this blog, we will discuss marketing ideas based on a few different budgets.
Low Budget
One of the most cost-effective forms of marketing is social media marketing. Setting up a business account on any of the major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc) is completely free. All of these platforms have built-in methods of paid advertising which are easy to use, but you can make posts, engage with your followers, and build your brand without spending any money.
Companies of all sizes should be on social media, but how much you spend on social media marketing depends on your size, budget, and goals. A large company like Target spends millions of dollars a year on marketing with a very large team to manage their social media. For small businesses, you, the business owner, can manage social media relatively easily. Want to upgrade your social media game? You can hire a dedicated social media manager or even work with a local marketing agency.
Another cost-effective form of marketing is Word-of-Mouth marketing. The most common form of this type of marketing is positive referrals from your customers. This is why having great customer service is so important. It is much more cost-effective to retain customers than to gain new customers. If you provide excellent service to all of your customers, the chance of them referring their friends to your business grows astronomically.
High Budget
With a greater budget, the marketing possibilities are endless. One form of paid marketing is media advertising such as radio and television. The cost of media advertising depends on the media channel you wish to advertise on. Radio advertising is generally much cheaper than television advertising. Radio also doesn’t include as much cost in creating the ad. For a radio commercial, you just need an audio recording. If you want to advertise on TV, you either need to film an actual commercial or animate one. Both of these are much more expensive than recording audio for radio. It is also cheaper per ad spot on radio than on tv. That being said, TV costs more for good reason, as there is generally a larger audience watching TV than listening to the radio.
As your marketing budget increases, you should also look into advertising online. There are plenty of different paid ways to advertise online that will make it easy to advertise to your target audience. If your company has an online presence, such as a website, you should be focusing on improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This includes managing your Google AdWords and website content in order to improve your ranking when someone Google’s your keywords.
You can also pay for sponsored posts on social media or ads on websites. This is different than purely staying active on social media as we discussed previously. These social media platforms allow you to pay to put your posts on specific demographics’ apps in order to assure that your ads are going to exactly the right audience you want. Similar to television commercials, you can also run video ads on platforms such as YouTube. You can also pay social media influencers to promote your product on their various social media channels as well. The cost of influencer marketing depends on the size of the influencer’s following.
To Sum Up
These are just a few of the many different marketing strategies any company can implement. Marketing is something that every company should include in their budget as it can directly result in increased business which results in increased sales. The most important thing is to find what works best for your company and to stick with it.