Picture this: You’re a marketing coordinator, you’ve been tasked with the responsibility of attracting consumers to your brand, and you need to make your boss happy. However, when you see your funding, you’re disappointed. You’re thinking to yourself, “How am I supposed to roll in the big bucks with a small marketing budget?”
As the sales and marketing manager at Freecom.net, I’ve found that the misconception you need an endless, explosive marketing budget to get anywhere online is a myth. Truth be told, if you do enough strategic planning from the outset and aim at realistic, targeted outcomes, you can achieve success with a limited budget.
Digital marketing doesn’t have to be expensive.
From my perspective, digital marketing shouldn’t be expensive. You need to plan the channels and resources you’ll allocate to your marketing efforts overall. It doesn’t matter if it’s SEO, pay-per-click advertising or social media marketing, no matter what platform you’re looking at tackling, you can dominate it with careful strategy and refinement.
You might choose to work with an agency to help you, or you can do this on your own. Do keep in mind, however, that if you’re not a marketing expert or are trying to learn the ropes from the very beginning, your budget can quickly be eaten up. Ensure you’re weighing all of the options you have on-hand and eliminating those that could potentially chew up your marketing dollars unnecessarily.
The good news is that even a beginner can take a few simple steps toward garnering traffic without spending too much money. If plunging into a dedicated, expert-driven campaign isn’t right up your alley yet, this is the best place to start.
Here are a few ways you can begin generating website traffic:
1. Use search engines to your advantage.
You might need a bit of SEO insight here to help you, but in a nutshell, you want to get as much traffic as possible from this organic platform. That means optimizing your content and website for keywords and phrases you know your target audience would be searching for. There are a few free tools available that you can quickly find online.
2. Check for broken links.
You’ll lose prospects and customers to links on your website that are broken. Review your website and check whether you have any URLs that need fixing. This is a quick way to get traffic back that you were otherwise letting escape.
3. Assess who’s talking about you.
Has anyone been writing or talking about your brand but not linking to your page? Consider reaching out to them and politely asking them to do so. This can help you gain more opportunistic traffic.
4. Update your old content.
This is a big one. If you’ve put effort into blogging in the past, have a gander through Google Analytics and see what content is performing the best. Update these posts with new stats, facts, quotes and images that will reap new attention. Let your audience know it has been updated as a call to action at the bottom of the article, and even with an “[UPDATED for 2020]” tag in the headline.
5. Use manual outreach as your sidekick.
I’m a big fan of going back to authentic relationships and connections to build links and awareness for brands. That means scouring the web for those in your industry who are like-minded and already writing about brands, services and goods like yours. You can offer them an incentive to write about your business and help turn their following into yours. Think of this as digital public relations, otherwise known as outreach.
6. Refresh your ranking content.
Use your choice of SEO tool to see what content of yours is ranking on page two of Google. This is the kind of content you want to refresh, optimize and get up to page one. It’s low-hanging fruit that will pay dividends in return.
Sometimes, generating website traffic with a limited marketing budget is a lot to handle. There are many aspects to juggle, and you still have to ensure you’re keeping on track with branding and style guides. But by setting honest expectations and taking the steps I’ve outlined above, you’ll be on your way to getting your brand out there with limited costs.
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