When growing a company, many business owners assume a giant marketing budget is going to be the foundation of their marketing campaign. People hear that Amazon spent over $20 billion on marketing this year, or look at how prevalent a local company can be, and they will assume that marketing begins at a high price point.
Businesses can easily spend a substantial portion of annual revenue on marketing, and of course, there are expensive and effective ways a small business can jump-start a marketing campaign, but those don’t have to be your starting point. You can get your business seen without a giant marketing budget.
At Bean Media Productions, we have 20+ years of experience working with small businesses and creating marketing campaigns that aren’t going to bankrupt the company. Today on the blog, we are going to explain how you should think about marketing in your business, and the strategies you should employ to get in front of your audience without spending far too much.
How does marketing fit into your business?
From the smallest solo-prenuer business to the largest Fortune 500 corporation, every company will have marketing. Whether you are B2B or B2C, how a business attracts new clients or customers is its marketing strategy.
You can spend $0 on marketing and still have a marketing campaign. Networking, word of mouth, and your reputation all contribute to your company’s sphere of influence. Even just asking people to “tell their friends” is a strategy to attract more people to your business.
Taking things a step up, you might look into getting a logo, or maybe some business cards, but hit the brakes for a second. Let’s talk about the strategy behind all of this.
You are now entering the point where you have to invest money to get more clients or customers for your business. You want these people engaging with your business so it can make your business revenue, either directly or indirectly. So the problem is, where do you spend your marketing budget to effectively get your business more engagement?
Tracking Your Marketing Results
Obviously, you want to invest less money than your marketing will make you. If you spend $1,000 on fliers and they generate $600 of business, then that was a failed marketing effort. As I’m sure you realize, it can be incredibly difficult to measure if your money came in from your marketing effort or if it was unrelated.
We’ve run into this problem ourselves. Luckily, our digital marketing strategies allow us to track results in detail. We provide all our clients with monthly reports so they can see how effective their marketing is.
Making the Most Out of Marketing Dollars
Look, if you spend less than $750 a month on marketing, you probably shouldn’t hire a digital marketing agency like us; but there are ways to improve your business’s visibility for less than that.
If you are truly very short on budget, hire freelance work, build a website, make a brand, and focus your efforts on one-and-done projects that will help get you seen and that will stick around for years to come.
All that being said, you can still have a much more effective campaign without spending $5,000+ every month. At Bean Media Productions, we have experience working with small and large marketing budgets. So now we are going to share with you some of the cost-effective ways small businesses can get more traffic.
Website
Through our years of specialized experience, we still find a solid website to be the foundation of any good marketing campaign. It gives your audience somewhere to learn about you, to contact you, and to engage with your business. It also serves as a key point in the client/customer journey. Creating a landing page on your website allows your other marketing strategies to shine and have that final step at the bottom of the funnel.
Websites, once they are made, don’t usually cost much to maintain, and will serve as a vital piece of your business’s marketing basically forever. Though it’s important to know, just because you have a website doesn’t mean you will get traffic to it.
Google Business Profile
When we onboard our clients, we make sure they have a Google Business Profile that is connected to their website and physical location. This serves as one of the primary ways that people will find your website online, and can be your first impression to a new individual who is interacting with your business.
Your GBP allows you to receive Google Reviews, appear on Google Maps, and overall allows you to be discoverable on Google Search. Setting up a Google Business Profile is usually a one-off expense, with some occasional maintenance being necessary.
SEO
You should have heard the term “Search Engine Optimization” if you are looking into any kind of digital marketing. This term refers to the strategies that marketers use to get your website appearing more commonly and with higher rankings on search engines like Google.
SEO typically consists of content on your website, with blog posts being the most common form of content.
Now SEO isn’t going to magically generate you 100 leads instantly. It is a slow process that lets your website be there IF the searcher is looking for your service. Some call it a “necessary evil” if your competitors do it and you don’t; that’s just business to your competitors.
SEO usually doesn’t cost much, but it usually won’t provide you with the most substantial results. Still, it can be instrumental in a business’s marketing campaign and is almost always worth the cost to do on a monthly basis.
Video Production
Now, from here on out, your marketing options will get more powerful, but more pricey. Video production is one of the most effective tools you can use in a digital marketing campaign. It’s highly persuasive, memorable, and draws eyeballs. It can also be expensive to produce, and once the video is created, it can be challenging to get results out of it.
At Bean Media Productions, frankly, we are obsessed with getting the most results out of your video production for the least cost. That’s what being a marketing agency is: creating a strategy that costs you the least, but brings you the most. We typically extract more value out of each production by creating not just a single video, but several clips that can be reused in the next two marketing strategies
Learn more about how we turn one video into a content library
Social Media Marketing
Social media, while it has its problems, remains one of the most effective ways a brand can reach its audience. Social media is where people’s eyeballs are. Facebook alone claims over 2 billion daily active users.
By creating a social media page and producing branded content to go on that page, you can build an organic following that consists of people who are interested in your business, whom you can share your messages with. It helps you be discoverable, available, and helps get your message in front of the right people.
The cost of social media marketing can vary drastically. A lot of social media marketing can be done internally. If you are working on something interesting, shoot a video, take a picture, and upload it to Instagram. If that’s not feasible, it may make more sense to hire an agency like us to create social media content for you. In that case, we would charge based on how many posts we make per month.
Advertising
Now, when you think of high marketing costs, you probably think of advertising. There are many types of ads and many ways to use an advertising campaign effectively. At its core, advertising is spending a premium rate to have premium access to your audience. This can be done on search engines, on social media, on websites, and really just about any platform that serves ads.
See more on different advertising platforms
These are usually pricey, but one of our main services we offer around advertising is our ability to take our budget, small or large and use it as efficiently as possible. There is A LOT of waste in advertising. Far too many people set a monthly budget and forget about it.
One of the biggest perks of working with an ad agency is that they can maintain constant vigilance and strategy behind your ad campaign, preventing money from being wasted on audiences or even on platforms that are not relevant to your business.
If you are looking for an experienced digital marketing agency to help you create an efficient marketing strategy that won’t waste your budget, then Bean Media Productions is exactly who you need.
We are a results-focused agency. Our main goal will always be to help you achieve your unique marketing goals. Contact us to discuss talk with experts about how your marketing strategy can be improved in a cost-efficient way that will make you money rather than waste it.
