Five cost effective digital marketing tools for SMEs

There’s an old saying that goes along the lines of “You have to spend money to make money”. But how much money should you be spending on marketing your business online?

With so many different approaches to digital marketing, your marketing spend can quickly balloon to unsustainable monthly fees. The good news is, there are several cost-effective ways to market your business online that are just as effective as their more costly counterparts.

Paid search

Paid search is the process of advertising your business on SERPs (search engine results pages), using tools like Google’s AdWords. In order to place an ad, you need to bid on the keywords that relate to your business. 

Whenever someone clicks on your advert, you pay for the click. Paid search can be an effective way to increase traffic to your website, but, the price for keywords differs wildly across different industries. The more popular a keyword is, the more money you’ll have to pay to use it.

Newsletter marketing

Also known as email marketing, newsletter marketing entails sending out an email newsletter to your existing consumer base. This is an affordable way to remind your existing customers of your products and services to stay top of mind, give them industry insights drawing on your expert knowledge, offering them exclusive discounts, or to tell them about specials you’re running. 

Tools like MailChimp make setting up a template and sending emails to your customer base simple, fast, and free – depending on the size of your database.

Social media marketing

There are several ways to market your business on social media: from running an ad campaign on Facebook or Instagram, to boosting posts on Twitter. While these methods can be effective, they can become complex and costly, especially in the light of increased ad rates on Facebook. 

A free way to capitalise on the exposure that social media can give your business is making use of Facebook for Business to create a page for your brand. By posting frequent updates and engaging with your audience, you can build up a following of new customers and ensure that your existing customers keep you top of mind.

Take up blogging

There are two reasons why more and more businesses are writing their own blogs:

1. Posting frequent content boosts your SEO. 
2. When blog posts are promoted on social media, they help to drive additional traffic to your website.

It’s one of the easiest and budget-friendly ways to boost your SEO efforts.

To get the most out of your blog, ensure that you’re posting content that is useful and interesting to potential customers. Remember, people don’t want to read about your products and services – they want to read about the ways in which your business can solve their problems, or benefit them. 

Lastly, make sure that you’re posting blogs relatively frequently, as fresh content is valued by both your audience and Google.

Online reviews on a trusted third party site

Online reviews are the preferred means of researching a business, and they help your marketing efforts in two important ways.

The first benefit is an increase in SEO. When consumers write and post reviews about the various facets of your offering, you’re “feeding” search engines with keyword-rich content (in the form of reviews). 

The more reviews your business receives, the higher Google will rank you. Instead of bidding on what can often be expensive keywords (as you would do with paid search) you reap the SEO rewards – for free. That’s right. For free.

The second benefit of using online reviews as part of your marketing strategy is the continuous generation of fresh content about your business. 

Instead of having to plan social media posts, your consumers do the hard work and create content for you! That said, a presence on social media and to a lesser degree, a blog, shouldn’t fall by the wayside just because you’re generating reviews.

Reviews on Hellopeter have helped over one million consumers make better choices. Had an experience you’d like to tell us about? Leave us a review here.