While some startups are very generously funded by venture capitalists, most have to deal with a severe cash crunch day after day before they find their footing. When you are struggling to make ends meet and trying to raise enough operational capital all by yourself, you need to make a budget that is efficient and cost-effective so that your business can survive. Here are some of the best digital marketing strategies for businesses with lean budgets:

Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups and Small Businesses

Flex Targeting on Facebook

Facebook flex targeting is a technique by which digital marketers can target specific audience profiles on the world’s most popular social media platform. While the method is very effective for scaling up your Facebook marketing campaign, it does not necessarily have to involve a very large budget. The concept allows marketers on Facebook to use a combination of multiple demographics, behavior or interests to discover specific audiences with the desired profile. Conversely, the technique can also be employed to exclude certain considerations to define a specific target audience that they wish to engage with.

Previously, Facebook did not permit marketers to use a combination of factors to define audiences and if they did use multiple factors, all the people having at least one characteristic would get included in the audience. This made the audience base unnecessarily broad and populated with people who possibly had no desire to convert into users. With flex targeting, marketers can now be as specific as they want to define their target audience leading to superior click through rates (CTR) and conversions.

Cross-Channel Remarketing

Conventional remarketing comprises delivering advertisements repeatedly on the same platforms where a potential customer has been active. Simply speaking if a user has at one point in time clicked on your ad on Google AdWords but did not ultimately convert, they would continue to be served the same ads on the same platform to compel them to convert. When remarketing is done across channels, it adds another layer of sophistication to the advertising process because now the ads are displayed on other platforms the same users are present on, in addition to the original channel. In other words, a person who is among the target audience who sees an ad on Google AdWords but does not convert can find themselves looking at the same ad on Instagram. The most notable advantage of this technology, according to a leading digital marketing agency Auckland, is that marketers can now combine the power of platforms that are driven by customer demand such as Bing and Google with that of behavior-based channels like Facebook. When used in this manner, the projected influence of the brand also seems to be greater. According to https://www.searchenginejournal.com, visitors on your site who are retargeted with ads are 70% more likely to return and convert than those who are not retargeted.

Instagram Ads

The good thing is that to advertise on Instagram, you don’t need to have an Instagram account because it can be managed via Facebook, its parent. It is also important to appreciate that by clicking on any Instagram ad, the user can be led to the website of the advertiser or a special landing page directly, without having to go through the profile of Instagram. You can also target your advertising at specific audience groups that are likely to be the most interested in your products and services with the 600-plus options for audience profiling offered by Facebook.

Mobile Focused Ads

Even though currently internet traffic generated by mobile devices is more than half of the entire volume of traffic, mobile advertising continues to be cheaper than desktop advertising. With an increasingly larger number of users attempting to search for information and transact on their mobile phones, it represents a wonderful opportunity for digital marketers to stretch their advertising budgets by setting up mobile marketing campaigns.

Google Analytics Smart Goals

Very often startups do not bother to track conversions as a result of which, it becomes very difficult for them to scale up their results. This is because they have no clue what is working and what is not, making the budget allocation more of a hit or miss affair. Google Analytics’ Smart Goals can resolve the problem because it uses data collected anonymously to automatically construct buying personas. It then selects high-quality traffic, i.e. traffic consisting of potential customers. It is possible to export the data to Google AdWords and use it to bid for ads on a cost per acquisition basis. By doing this, marketers can ensure that Google will only show the ads to people who have the maximum potential for buying your products or services while staying within the maximum amount that you are ready to spend.

Blogging with Engaging Content 

Publishing engaging content relevant to the interests of your audience can be very cost-effective because it is possible to publish and promote them well without having to spend a lot of money. The real investment is in the form of hiring people or even content management agencies for generating the content. Blogging is considered to be very effective in not only attracting and nurturing sales leads but also for search engine optimization while providing great value to the target audience. Publishing quality content regularly also helps the business to establish trust, credibility, and authority with customers and search engines that act as strong and positive SEO signals for better ranking on the search engine results pages. For blogs to be effective in delivering value to users, content managers need to focus on ensuring that the topics are relevant and useful and the content is of very high quality, original, and current. Blogs need not be text only; videos and images can be used to create extra engagement and memorability. The beauty of blog content is that it is possible to repurpose it and present the same information in many different ways so that you do not always have to look out for new topics.

Conclusion 

While digital marketing may seem very complex and expensive on the face of it, the truth is that many methods do not need a great amount of money to kick off and sustain. These techniques are ideal for startups and small businesses who need to balance their small budgets effectively.

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