Marketers are well known for working within a budget to develop their marketing campaigns. Some budgets are big and some budgets are small. But the ability to get a little for a lot is going to get even trickier as budgets wane due to the current economic recession.
What tactics should you focus on during this time? The ones that give you the most “bang for your buck.” And the best bang is anything online.>
- Update your website often during this time to reflect accomplishments, client acquisitions, major awards, investor announcements or any type of news that is important for your organization to share. You already have a website, be sure to use it to convey information to stakeholders. The first place users go to get information on a company is their website. Rule 1: Keep it up to date.
- Avoid the costs of printing and distribution and use email marketing instead to deliver important messages to clients and prospects. It’s cheap and very often free. With the ability to track open rates, bounce backs, click-throughs and forwards, you’ll wonder why you ever used print before
- Develop RSS feed capability to allow users to subscribe to updates on your site. That way, as you make changes to your site (Rule #1) subscribers get updated automatically. You’ve just completed two tasks with this one initiative. Your boss will be proud!
- Use >podcasts to convey important corporate information to stakeholders with a personal touch. Instead of organizing a press conference or meeting where people have to commute and travel to attend, get out your digital video camera and prepare an online presentation that can be easily emailed, put online and downloaded to portable devices
- Use Youtube. Post your video content online for free and watch how many hits you get
- Increase your reach by integrating viral marketing features on your website, e-newsletters and e-communications to allow others to pass along your message. Word of mouth is terribly powerful and the online version has a global reach. By adding an e-newsletter sign up function on your site, and deploying an e-newsletter with a viral marketing component (send to a friend), you have just completed 3 tasks with one initiative. Multi-tasking at its best!
- Update your keywords and metadata to reflect relevant information and search terms to increase your SEO
- Use free online tools such as Google Analytics to monitor your web traffic and keyword searches which affect your efforts in item #6 above. Monitor and adjust monthly or bi-monthly to optimize listings>
- Deploy a blog as a way of communicating with stakeholders and increasing your SEO. Contribute to both your blog, and others, to increase back links. Create a Twitter account for all the same reasons. Then use a free tool such as href="http://www.radian6.com/" target="_blank"> Radian 6 offers to monitor and manage all your online social marketing activities
- Be active> on relevant online sites and communities such as LinkedIn by answering questions and using connections for networking, business development and marketing purposes
- Create a contest or game online that encourages interest, usage, forwarding and buzz
- Use Ad Sense to specify the criteria you specify keywords that trigger ads and don’t pay for ads seen but not responded to
- Give free samples to generate interest in your product (if applicable). Create an online contest, or form, include viral marketing features and capture information about recipients for later communication opportunities. Ask people to post comments on your blog about the sample and now you’ve got online buzz
- (search engine optimization). Ensure your content and keywords match, create alt tags on all images and ensure your keywords are ones that users actually employ to search your company listing. All free. Other free tools to help you in your SEO efforts: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#, http://www.google.com/trends, http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Experience Solutions
