Marketing for a business may well begin with word-of-mouth advertising. Your happy clients are only too happy to promote your business. Certainly, you want to consider sending out a regular email newsletter to keep these valuable clients up to date with new products, services or specials.
As a business, you have to look carefully at all the marketing options available to you and what they cost.
Content marketing
Content marketing has many benefits and is one of the best methods of promoting a business online. It is cheaper to produce than other forms of marketing and it offers long-lasting results.
Good quality content doesn’t date quickly and drives traffic to the website for many years. Unlike other kinds of marketing, such as pay-per-click advertising, content marketing can drive free, organic traffic to your website.
There is value for a business to invest in creating quality content. It’s important if you want to stand a chance of competing in today’s online marketplace. Good content offers higher visibility in search engines and more referral traffic from inbound links.
The legal aspects
When you start a new business, you have to put your start-up funding where it pays off more for you. There are all those legal aspects and documents – a business plan to evaluate start-up costs as well as all those licenses and permits.
Pre-opening start-up costs will certainly include a business plan as well as technology expenses and research expenses. Then again, post-opening costs will include advertising and promotion. Also, different business structures – partnerships, sole proprietorships and corporations have different start-up costs.
The cool thing with Net Lawman is that you don’t have to pay a lawyer for these legal documents. You’re able to download document templates from their website and create contracts yourself cheaply and quickly. Then you simply print, sign, date it and execute. You don’t even need law-knowledge to create a professional, legally binding document.
Public relation
it’s difficult to say how much PR will cost as the exposure- and costs will vary. Costs, for instance, may be to simply pay your regular salary to your talented internal public relations expert. Then again, your PR may be bigger and extend to public relations campaigns or events. Costs will also determine whether your public relations is once-off or ongoing.
As opposed to charging costly monthly retainers, there are those who offer quality, custom marketing at a much more cost-effective rate. Maybe as a start-up, you don’t even have the budget to spend on PR, let alone hiring a PR firm.
Do research because there are marketing services that charge just for the services the client needs, based on their budget and goals, from e-newsletters to website copy, PR, social media updates and much more.
Then again, with research you can find a number of free resources on the Internet that provide advice on how to devise a strategic PR campaign.
Email marketing and social media
Email marketing still leads the way with the highest percentage of good ROI results. Email marketing connects you directly with customers, yielding a high ROI, and social media marketing isn’t far behind.
In the UK, according to The Data and Marketing Association, they say that for each £1 you spend on your email marketing campaigns, you can roughly expect a return of £32.
This depends on list size and product. You just have to look at Facebook, too, to see it is an important channel for marketers. With Facebook, for instance, you can buy ads through ad management.
You set your budget and create your own ad. The ads are shown to those people who are likely to be interested in what you have to show.
With marketing on Facebook, you set your advertising budget – maybe every day or over the course of the campaign. You also set a bid, which is the most amount you want to pay when someone sees your ad.