8 Cost Effective Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Brand

As you look to grow your brand and expand your client base, the key is finding a balance between effective marketing strategies that are also affordable and will increase your ROI.

Marketing is an unavoidable aspect of running a business, but it can be costly, particularly if the strategies you employ are not effective with your particular demographic. Fortunately, there are several tried-and-true and emerging marketing trends to help you increase brand awareness, connect with existing and prospective clients, and encourage conversions.

Here is a look at some of the most cost-effective strategies across a range of platforms:

1. Email marketing

As the name implies, email marketing involves connecting with prospective and existing clients through email campaigns. To create an effective email marketing strategy, it’s important to find the balance between personalizing the content without invading the user’s privacy. Ideally, you want to send emails containing relevant, valuable information to the receiver that builds upon an existing relationship. Other purposes of email marketing include brand promotion, product marketing, and lead nurturing.

2. Organic Marketing Strategies

Organic marketing refers to the process of getting users to seek out your brand naturally over time, rather than connecting with them via boosted posts and paid advertising. That doesn’t mean you won’t spend any money – there are still costs associated with developing organic marketing tools. What organic marketing requires even more is time and effort, but that translates into long-term sustainable growth for your business.

3. Link Building

A link building campaign can also be a cost effective marketing strategy. By exchanging links with other websites, you increase your own site’s quality backlinks. You can improve your backlink strategy by offering your content as a resource, getting listed on directories, leveraging public relations, writing competitive content, writing testimonials for other websites, and commenting on other relevant blog posts. Building links demonstrates that your website is a quality resource for the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO).

4. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is one component of an effective inbound marketing strategy that involves engaging prospective clients from a defined target group throughout your entire marketing process to the point they become paying customers. Some tactics for nurturing leads at each stage of the buyer’s journey include targeted content, timely follow ups, personalized emails, and multi-channel nurturing.

5. Social Media

Within the past decade, social media has come to forefront as one of the most popular forms of marketing and advertising. Through a myriad of social media networks – including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube – you can share content, video and images that your users find valuable and want to share, thus increasing visibility and web traffic for your brand. Social media marketing is often considered effective because it “humanizes” your brand, connecting with your users on platforms they frequently use. It also encourages conversions and reduces marketing spending while increasing lead generation.

6. Content Marketing

Maintaining a blog is an effective way of driving traffic to your website and increasing exposure of your brand. To improve the SEO of your blog posts, however, it’s important to not just include relevant keyword phrases but to also provide high-quality content to your users. Also, you can expand your content marketing beyond blog posts, and communicate with your audience through infographics, videos, white papers, webinars, podcasts, and eBooks, as well.

7. SEO

Speaking of SEO, many people misperceive this process as a standalone marketing tactic. In fact, it is an inbound marketing strategy that is achieved by several tactics working in tandem to increase awareness about a particular website. Some of these tools include those discussed above: email, social media, link building, banner ads and other digital marketing tools. Collectively, these tools help ensure your website ranks high among “natural,” or unpaid, search results on search engines.

8. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising, both online and through non-digital platforms, remains a cost-effective way to generate high visibility for your brand. One of the most popular search engine marketing (SEM) methods is pay-per-click (PPC) links. Paid advertising is effective because it is easily adaptable to multiple markets and audiences and has substantial reach.

Developing an Effective Marketing Plan

No matter which marketing strategies you intend to use, it’s critical to first develop a marketing plan by which you can gauge the effectiveness of your various marketing tools and ensure your actions are driving your brand toward a defined goal. If you are ready to start developing a cost-effective marketing plan for your brand, contact L7 Creative to discuss what strategies are most suitable for your business objectives and financial goals.