by Marsha Kelly, Serial Entrepreneur
If you are a small business owner, you might be tired of the label “Small.” The main way to get that label off is to promote your business to make it grow bigger. The problem here is that smaller businesses don’t have the necessary budget for that. So how to promote your business if you are on a budget?
Fortunately for you, advancement of technologies has created dozens of ways to promote your business easier and cheaper now. In order to be more precise and cost-efficient, you can use various mobile marketing channels.
Everything is going into mobile devices today. This means that you need to target your audience there as well. But which mobile marketing channel is better and cheaper is up to you to decide. Below we present 6 best mobile marketing channels that are reasonably priced for small businesses.
Social Media Optimization
Perhaps everyone in your target audience has a social media account. There are dozens of opportunities for you to promote your business there. You have to use as many of them as you can.
The simplest way to use social media for marketing is running a business page and just posting advertisements there. Besides posts, it is also effective to make stories about your services and disseminate them. Stories are fun, interactive and more importantly, short. This means that they have higher chances of reaching your target audience.
Another way to use social media for marketing is blogging. You can make small blogs, preferably videos on something both interesting for your audience and related to your business. It gives you wide opportunities to improvise and get creative.
Additionally, most of the social media services are free, so all you’ll need is to pay a proper social media manager to be in charge of it. However, if you don’t want to hire an employee to do that, there are a couple of AI applications that can do social media management for you. They can send follow requests to your target audience, get you new connections and make your page appear wherever your potential clients are.
Social Media Ads
Besides the free opportunities, you can also pay for some considerably useful advertising tools in social media. Those tools are practical and they definitely make up to their cost. As in the case of a business account, here you have a variety of options to promote your business.
There is an advertisement space for your product among posts and stories. It is also possible to promote the whole business page itself. The main advantage of social media ads is that you have a variety of options to choose from.
You can choose to have ads that will charge you per clicks on them. Cost per click ads on Facebook cost around $0.27 per click (as an example). If this option is not the best for you, you can choose a target audience and pay per 1000 impressions. It will cost approximately $7. You can choose your audience based on different criteria like age, gender, demographics, location or preferences.
SMS Marketing
Social media marketing may have overshadowed SMS marketing, but little do small business owners know that it’s much more efficient. Text message marketing is more direct and personal communication between a business and its clients.
Apparently, text messages are much more personal for clients than random business’s social media posts. Therefore, sending text messages will guarantee a more open rate, therefore increasing customer interaction and making the campaign much more effective. In fact, text messages have over 98% open rate. The only issue for SMS marketing is choosing attractive hooks and making your overall message appealing. It is a tough job, considering that you only get 160 characters for that.
In terms of pricing, the average cost per 1000 messages ranges from $10 to $20. It mostly depends on the country and the provider. There is a big range of providers that can give you different packages based on your preferences. It is indeed more expensive than ads on social media, but the fact is that it will have a much higher ROI later.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a strong communication tool for any kind of businesses. Moreover, it is considerably cheap, which makes it much more suitable to the financial needs of smaller businesses. Email is a great place to use attractive visuals, make personalized offers and etc.
You can have a separate list of special customers and send them premium promotions like personalized discounts or coupons. As opposed to text messages, emails don’t have any limitation for characters, which gives them a little edge here. Although it would be fair to mention that emails have much lower open and conversion rates.
Still, by choosing the right hook in the subject line and right appealing text, you can attract a lot of customers. Email marketing will be low-priced for you since you’ll only need to pay specialists for sorting the email database and coming up with proper content. But, just like for social media, you can use bots to do the email work for you. The bots can separate customer groups and send them automated emails based on your set preferences.
Search Engine Optimization
Customers are now independent to look for a product or services they need. There is so much information available that they no longer need to go out and ask for something. Thus, you must make sure your website is optimized for search engines so that your business is on the top search results.
This will not directly double your sales, but it will guarantee lead generation and raise overall brand awareness. With advanced SEO apps, you will not even bother to hire someone to do that. You can just buy applications that are mostly around $60-150 per month. Moreover, most applications have free trial periods.
Google Ads
Google Ads work similar to social media ads, with one difference. You can put your advertisements everywhere, starting from video games to different websites. You can also target the audience based on their preferences, demographics age or sex.
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