Top 8 Free/Low Budget Marketing Tools to Lift Your Business
Today we live in the Internet era. Although countries have borders, markets have no borders. Whether you have a small or large business , your product can be sold all over the world. Therefore, small businesses have a more difficult time due to the small number of budgets. But digital marketing tools are a blessing for small businesses . Almost all digital marketing tools are free to use or there are many free marketing tools that can be used by small businesses.
To stay in the market, small businessesmust use digital marketing tools. Small businesses are now making plans to go virtual, where the customer and consumer can easily find their products or be inspired to buy. Today it is becoming a key success factor for businesses to be visible everywhere and compete in the global marketplace. The advantages of using digital marketing tools is countless. The more a small business uses digital marketing tools, the more it ensures its existence in the markets.
Equal Opportunity: Small businesses receive an equal opportunity to reach customers using digital marketing tools. Now small businesses can compete with the industry leader. They can talk or describe their products to customers around the world without using a call center or branch office.
Affordable: Small businesses always think about the budget they can spend on running the business. So they can't hire a top model or make an ad that could be featured on a TV show. Nowadays, most people use social media , and small businesses can spend less money and sometimes even get free use of digital marketing tools.
Real-time Results: Using digital marketing tools, small businesses can easily see their customers' transaction process, new customers arriving, or customer reactions to their website . Therefore, digital marketing tools deliver real-time results.
Direct Interaction: Small businesses gain the ability to communicate directly with customers through a variety of digital devices. It also results in a customized product for the customer, which helps the small business retain customers. Apart from these results, digital marketing tools help grow a small business into a large one. Because of this, there are many opportunities for small businesses to choose a digital marketing strategy or use multiple tools at the same time. Although there is no free food in the world, free digital marketing tools primarily help small businesses learn and adapt modern marketing strategy to cope with global business.
Micro Leaders are people who are opinion leaders for a particular subculture. For example, marketing directors, IT directors, popular designers, Strelka engineers, stylists, etc. It is important that they have more than 2-3 thousand subscribers belonging to the target audience segment.
On a commercial or barter basis, a micro leader can publish a post informing about your product or service. This post is visible to the target audience.
Next, you launch a targeted Facebook campaign* for the same audience. The user comes across an advertisement and remembers that one of his friends recently used this service. The psychological barrier is removed, now he is more inclined to buy. So the conversion from advertising grows at times.
Important! The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no exchange that regulates interaction with Facebook* micro leaders.
You need to look for these people on your own, send them letters, sort out answers, and such work cannot be automated. Also, you won’t be able to select opinion leaders using math — Facebook* doesn’t provide scraping services.
We understand in practice how this happens. Suppose you are launching a product in the Moscow market. Go to the page of the person you are interested in, which, relatively speaking, has 50 thousand subscribers. From this number, you manually sort out those who have more than 2-3 thousand friends, and from them you choose those who live in Moscow. Then you evaluate how these people are suitable for the partner integration you need.
For those whom you have selected, write a letter of the following nature: “Hello! My name is User Name, I'm the CMO of a start-up, we're launching and would like to offer you a free trial of our product in exchange for posting your experience."
Of the 100 conditional people, 30 will agree to the publication. After that, you need to set up a Facebook* advertising campaign for the same audience.
This method is suitable for those who need to talk about the product to a new audience, especially in B2C. The cost of customer acquisition through direct targeted advertising on Facebook. In this case it can be sky-high. And efficiency is weak. This method allows you to make marketing messages as targeted as possible.
Does this method work on the VKontakte social network? There, as a rule, people are subscribed to 1000 publics and almost never read the news feed in full. The post of the opinion leader in this case will go unnoticed.
Important! If you have a complex product, then a case of wine from Invisible can be a good barter option for a micro leader.
Offer for company employees
If your target audience is concentrated within specific employer companies or interacts closely with them, the question arises of how to reach these centralized companies. Within many of them there is such a position as a communication manager. This is a person who is responsible for communications within the company, non-material motivation of employees, and the like. Such a specialist very often makes mailings with a special offer to the database of employees. If you can get into this mailing list, that's a win.
Let's see how it works in practice. You need to send to the managers of these companies an appeal of a similar format: “Good afternoon! I represent such a startup and would like to make a unique offer for your company: a discount on the first service in order to test . We provide this service to you free of charge. Try it twice, and if you like it, we'll make an offer for your employees."
It is very important to make a really good entry offer, because the success of the campaign depends on it.
Offers for employees must be changed every month: now you give a discount, then “1 + 1”, then “buy 2, get 3”. Thus, by changing offers, you can organize a new mailing list over and over again. This tool is good because you, in fact, establish direct contact with your target audience for free.
If you can interest part of the team, information about your product will spread very quickly, because corporate employees are a fairly active audience within their niche.
Important! The only difficulty is that the number of large advanced companies with a normal level of earnings and a developed internal corporate culture is limited.
If you need a lot of sales, you can simply upload a list of companies in Moscow that employ more than 1-2 thousand people and see if they might be interested in the product, if this is your target audience. If you, for example, sell women's cosmetics, then you need to look where more women work.
Integration into external loyalty programs
Loyalty programs work like this: a person uses the product and receives bonuses for this, which he pays in partner stores. Integration into external loyalty programs is good because you are guaranteed to attract new customers.
For example, you enter into a partnership agreement with Euroset. It connects you to the loyalty program on the "Corn" card. Now card users have the opportunity to come to your store and buy something at a big discount.
One of the main pitfalls of this method: you can spend a lot of time and money integrating into such loyalty programs, but in fact they will cannibalize your traffic - you will pay for those users who come to you. Therefore, even before the start of cooperation, resolve the issue of promotion from the partner: clearly fix the number of mailings, publications on social networks and SMS messages, and also evaluate the quality of promotion in other channels.
Important! Loyalty programs of companies that are subscribed to by active users who are passionate about new technologies and product solutions work best.
Unsold traffic of large sites
It is difficult for a young site to get traffic from search engines. There is a way out - to buy visits and transitions to the site. Most often they are purchased at programmable online auctions (RTB) in real time. In addition, there are limited auctions and direct sales.
You can agree with sellers on the format of display advertising: banners, video ads, text and graphic blocks, branding (using recognizable brand attributes in website design).
When buying banner places, pay attention to the theme and attendance of the site, the attractiveness of the banner and its location.
How does it work in practice? Programmed online auctions use massive amounts of data to analyze prices, venues, and audiences. Thus, advertisers are offered the best prices, and advertising buyers are offered quality traffic. Your bid per impression depends on factors such as device, placement, category, user age, and more.
You can participate in auctions through specialized agencies. What is the difficulty here? Programmatic technologies have provided sites with guaranteed advertising sales, and therefore they are in no hurry to sell high-quality audiences at low prices. Another difficulty is that programming is not yet very developed in Europe. There are not so many players in the market as, for example, in the USA.
Important! If the sites have refused to cooperate, try contacting them again at the end of the month. Give them access to the funnel so they understand how many orders came from them and how much they earned from it.
Cross-promo with rewards in partner's currency
Cross-promotion is a joint advertising campaign. Companies that have the same or similar target audiences agree on cooperation. For example, many Western fashion brands arrange collaborations with each other. A simple and effective example of cross-promotion is a joint mailing.
For this method, you need to find a brand whose target audience is similar to yours and offer to prepare a joint newsletter or other promotion. And the user of the partner base can be provided with a reward from the partner service.
Important! The main thing is to agree with a partner on providing a bonus in the form of free access to his product. Your product may be unfamiliar to his audience, so it will be difficult to interest her in a discount.
Use the discount on your product as an additional incentive to buy.
Proper use of Pressfeed
The site pressfeed.ru often searches for heroes of famous publications, such as The Village, The Secret of the Firm and others. Television people are also active. This is the most famous aggregator of requests from journalists. It is important that your target audience is among the media readers.
Often, the media are interested in the fact that the heroes of the headings are people who have real business experience.
Journalists who are looking for speakers or requesting expert opinion write a post on Press Feed from the category: “We need an expert on the topic of startups. I'm looking for a hero who left his wife to start his own business." Topics can be very different. You can leave a request, wait for a report from a journalist, tell your story and get PR at zero cost.
Newsjacking
Newsjacking is a reaction to cool newsbreaks in various ways: pictures, texts, memes. Content is published on the official pages of the company.
Important! Subscribe to news sources such as Reddit, iFanny, Buzzfeed - these foreign sites originate from what will be popular after some time.
How does it work in practice? Respond to newsbreaks within 1-2 days from the moment they appear. Memes have an expiration date, and it's very short, so it's important to keep an eye on the agenda. Featured images always get the most exposure and reactions at no extra cost.
Use the power of content marketing to your advantage. If you have experienced employees, then they have something to share. Have your programmer co-author the article with a copywriter. Place it, for example, on Habré. A quality article will always attract attention, and you will be able to find not only new customers, but also employees.
Tests
Many marketers believe that tests are the future. It doesn't matter how formal or extravagant they are. For example, Tinkoff Bank invites blog readers to find out if they are facing a financial curse.
In order to implement this mechanic, you need to prepare a technical task for a full-time specialist or a freelancer to develop a test that meets the goals and objectives of your product. Remember that the test should be fun or useful, or better, both. For example, for an online clothing store, the test "How to understand that you are a shopaholic" would be an ideal option.
Place information about your store in the test, and be sure to put a promotional code for your products on the results page.
During development, do not forget that today users are stricter about the content on their pages. The test should be clear and catchy so that people want to share it.
Important! Do not stop working with the test after it is over. Arrange a contest among those who shared.
Gather information about the people who take your tests. Set up retargeting for them. Offer them products, discounts, special offers, or other tests to ultimately lead them to purchase.
Summary
We have described the main methods of budget-free marketing that work and give good results. You can use them when introducing a new product to the market to assess demand, or you can even include them in your marketing strategy as ongoing activities. For example, offer different tests to your audience every three months or connect to a new loyalty program every year.
Important! Most importantly, don't forget that you need to choose ways to budget-free marketing based on the business goals of your product, and not vice versa.
You can learn more secrets of online marketing from the webinars and materials that we offer to students of the course for online advertisers, conducted in conjunction with the Clickbolt agency.