Digital marketing is the best way to optimize a small budget.
Digital marketing is the modern day flyer. While you can blast telephone poles and store windows and public gathering spaces with flyers promoting your business, this method does not allow for tracking ROI (unless if you provide a coupon, of course). With social media platforms having such tremendous variety in audiences, you can now have access to hundreds of millions of consumers. Not only can you reach local customers on your local block, but you can reach audiences slightly out of your community, that may share similar interests in what you have to offer.
Digital marketing not only allows you to post value-providing content for free, but you can pay to have your content seen by as little as 1 cent per click. This allows even the smallest ad budgets to prove successful if placed in front of the right audiences. We have personally seen ad campaigns with single-digit daily budgets succeed and pull more page likes, page views, and website views from people who would have otherwise never seen our clients’ content. This means it would be possible for you to spend as little as a couple hundred dollars a month on advertising and see significant success. It is always better to advertise a little than not at all.
How to run successful promotions:
With digital marketing promotions being so inexpensive, the only thing keeping you from running successful ads is providing content that people want to see. Depending on the goal of your promotion, you will want to look into a few different options (there are a lot). If you are interested in simply increasing engagement, page views, page likes, or promoting a specific post, it would be ideal to choose a piece of content that is already popular among your followers. This post should have a lot of likes (relative to your average) and should provide some sort of value to the user (informative, entertaining, or align with the interests of your audience). When promoting a post that has already been published, it is generally referred to as “boosting” a post.
If you have a different goal in mind, there are plenty of other ways to effectively expand your audience reach. Facebook and Google both provide you with the opportunity to run lead-generating ads. These ads should be focused on differentiating you from your competition, and especially focused on providing a great value to the viewer. This value shouldn’t be something simple, it should be both a functional and emotional benefit to choosing your product or service. These types of ads generally cost more, but are very efficient in increasing your customer base rapidly and accurately.
If you have a website you would like to promote, there are ads for these as well. Google is a great platform to promote your business’ website, but SEO keywords are essential to getting your business noticed (along with eye-catching creative). Social media platforms also allow you to promote your website and track your click-through rate on each promotion. This will give you the number of times (or the rate at which) viewers clicked on your website link from the ad.
If you have a specific action you want to promote on your website or business page, there are several ways to do this as well. Whether it is a sale, claiming an offer, signing up for an event, or simply generating leads, you can promote this action through an ad linking the viewer to the specific action page. You can then encrypt a code into your website that [anonymously] pixels every user who completes the desired action on your page, effectively tracking your conversions. These conversion ads provide a very accurate illustration of your conversion-success rate that your ads provide. You will also get a good idea of how much it costs to convert a user online (ex. $10/conversion). These ad campaigns generally cost a bit more as well.
How to optimize audiences you are advertising to:
Most social media platforms allow you to create very specific, segmented audiences. These audiences can be created from a wide range of characteristics. You can create audiences with specific interests, demographics, or behaviors (very useful for small businesses), or you can create audiences from your website viewers. Or, you can combine several different characteristics (fewer is better).
You can also create retargeting audiences. This allows you to show your ad to people who completed a certain action or engaged with certain posts on your page and/or website. This feature is vital to increasing brand awareness, and provides an opportunity to give more value to a variety of audiences. Arguably the most effective aspect to this feature is retargeting users who began to take an action on your page, but abandoned it part-way through. You can run very specific ads to this audience group, inviting them to finish completing the desired action.
Takeaways:
Digital marketing provides small businesses with inexpensive promotional options that reach large audiences who would have otherwise never heard of your brand
Digital marketing allows the advertiser to accurately track their ROI, conversion rate, and other qualitative factors that determine success
A large variety of goals to choose from, each with their own specific algorithm to better optimize for a small budget
Custom audiences allow small businesses to describe their ideal customer and target users that fit those specifications
You can retarget people who show interest in your business by visiting your page or website
You can boost post engagement as cheap as 1 cent per click
You can use digital marketing to produce leads out of thin air
You can gain traction quickly by reaching similar audiences outside of your normal target range
