Well, it’s always better to get a professional to advertise your business. But what if your budget is actually low and all you can do is promote your products by own possible resources?
There are several online tools that will help you get a good promotion on the web if you do them in a right way.
A common question that every entrepreneur has to answer is whether they should use search-engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising or else for driving visitors to his or her website. Still, these are several cost-effective traffic sources and each has pros and cons that need to be considered.
Here we go with 5 tips on how to advertise on a budget:
1. Google AdWords
When a customer is looking for a product or service anywhere in the world, they’re likely going to search for it on Google. That customer may be looking for you. For a small business, AdWords can be a successful tool of driving traffic, marketing product and ultimately getting increased sales.
With Google AdWords you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get targeted website traffic. If you set your company right, a small daily budget of $10-$20/day can provide you with a good traffic.
The main task here is to thoroughly select the list of keywords you want to target your ads on. Make sure to track these keywords in Google trends to find out whether they are actually searched by users in Google or not. Next thing to do is to create a catchy short copy for a contextual ad that usually appears at the top of Google search results. You should pay attention to crafting a compelling banner for display ads, if you decide to advertise on other websites that you have previously chosen from the list in Google adwords.
Finally, having launched Google ads campaign don’t forget to track the results on a daily basis and respond to changes by optimizing the list of keywords used or ad texts.When good traffic from Google ads is provided, you will be getting leads, as long as the ad is relevant.
2. Facebook Ads
There are few ways of advertising on FB. First of all, if you got a Facebook page of your business and want to make it more popular, you can use such tools as ‘More likes’ campaign and ‘Page post engagement campaigns’.
If you have an application and want to promote it, choose ‘App installs’ campaign or ‘App engagement’ campaign.
And if you decide to promote your website on Facebook and get more traffic from there, there are two types of advertising that can be chosen. First one is called ‘Clicks to website’, which encourages people to visit your website. Second - ’Website conversions’ - helps to create ads to make people do specific actions, like ‘Sign up’, ‘Buy now’, ‘Learn more’ or other. This type of campaign allows to change pictures or copies. There is a special conversion-tracking pixel tool on Facebook ads that helps to track traffic that goes from a certain Facebook ad campaign to your website. Also, you will be able to target specific audience, which includes locations, age, gender, interests, and other features similar to your product categories.
Don’t panic if people don’t immediately buy your product after launching your Facebook ad. We suggest to test different campaigns. Statistics shows that nearly a half of potential clients stay connected with your company by “liking” your Facebook business page. That’s how you can generate a database of potential consumers.
3. Online Publishing / Backlinks
Try writing and submitting articles on the topics your customers may be interested in to the websites of high reputation, like Ezinearticles.com, Articlesbase.com or others ones that seem important for your business.
Some of the websites offer exchange for content, which is a couple of backlinks to your resource. This kind of activity helps to build your online reputation of an expert in a field and brings new traffic and potential leads.
Also, you may try to reach out to reputable bloggers, who may be interested in your product and they can leave comments or write a review or an article about it. Some of them charge for such promotional posts, but there are always options to suggest them your product or some kind of a barter.
4. Link Up with LinkedIn Ads
You may also try out LinkedIn network. If you own a B2B company, it is a good way to reach your target audience through LinkedIn advertising. If your audience is small and you need to define its general characteristics, use features like geography, demographics, job title or LinkedIn Group. You may look through the specific LinkedIn Groups and see what exactly customers want and what they communicate about there. With this data, you can try to craft a message your consumers waited for ages :). Don’t forget to add an eye-catching picture, to capture the attention of your potential clients. A highly attractive picture increases the probability of people clicking your post and reading it. Run your LinkedIn ads until they get less successful, which can be tracked easily in ads section.
5. Donate Products or Volunteer with benefits
Another way of efficient advertising are donations and volunteering, especially for the new business. This kind of work has to be performed wisely.
If your business needs financial support, you can try Kickstarter – a wide American crowdfunding platform. If the idea of your business is useful and original, people will donate you resources and you’ll be closer to your dream business.
When people learn about the great things you are doing, they will get more interested in your products, so the investment of a $1000, can bring you $5000 of revenue, just because investors see you’re a good guy and money is not the greatest thing in this world. It’s really important to show a positive opinion about you and your business.
Nevertheless, not every tool or method will work for any business. All you can do is experiment and combine two or more methods. It’s even better you’d use them all. But make sure to dedicate some time to each method so as to understand it better. Or delegate this job to marketing professionals ;).
And what methods of online advertising have proved to be successful for your business?
