Understanding the problem
“How can I run a Low-Budget Marketing Campaign and still get good results?”
Many of our clients approach us with limited resources for marketing purposes. They wish to explore new marketing venues, however, they cannot afford to pay for expensive marketing campaigns.
Firstly, nothing tests your digital business model more than tight budget and deadlines!
Secondly, this is not a unique situation, all companies have to measure returns on investments.
Although, large enterprises find it easier to calculate their ROI, or at least have more relevant predictions of their marketing campaign effects.
That’s why Small and Medium size businesses have to approach the problem of limited funds by asking a couple questions first:
- Who am I trying to reach with my marketing campaign, i.e. who is my customer?
- What message am I trying to convey to my current/potential customer? Or what is the goal of your campaign?
- What channels are the best to communicate effectively with my customers?
- What is the marketing strategy that will accomplish my campaign goals at the cheapest possible cost?
The Process of conducting a Low-Budget Marketing Campaign
To help our customers, Phu Concepts has developed a process to solve this problem and answer your questions.
In this blog, we will help you make the best decisions going forward with your marketing campaigns and give your actionable insights and recommendations that will save you a fortune!
STEP 1 – Define Customer Persona before choosing any low-budget marketing campaign
Based on the data you have already collected from your existing customers and hot leads, you may have some ideas of who is your customer.
Low-budget marketing campaigns are naturally harder. Thus, you need to revise all data captured on your customers and delve into understanding WHO YOUR CUSTOMER IS.
Profile your customer across these dimensions:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Behavior Online
- Professional Background (for B2B customers)
How can you define your Customer Persona?
Much of the data you may access on your Social Media Pages, by Social Listening to your audiences.
With 3.8 Billion active Social Media users (and increasing!) in 2020, the evidence is more than clear.
Also, by using Google Analytics, which is absolutely free and gives your immense power and command over data. You may learn how to use Google Analytics in their Academy for beginners.
Phu Tip for Defining the Customer Persona:
Here at Phu Concepts, we use advanced tools to observe behavior online and offline, using modern techniques to track mouse movements.
When conducting marketing campaigns with a small budget, you come across obstacles you are not able to surmount without shelling out.
Subsequently, Phu Concepts offers you our expertise and resources in defining your customer persona!
For example, by viewing click maps and heat maps we are able to understand what your visitors are looking for and what expectations your digital assets are not meeting.
In addition, we offer our expertise in define your Customer Persona based on our data too. Simply by cross-examining with our database, we are able to ‘read between the lines’ of user behavior, social media engagement stats, etc.
This step is very important! Failing to segment your customers correctly will lead to terrible ROI after your marketing campaigns are over.
STEP 2 – Assess your Marketing Funnel and choose a funnel stage to control with your low-budget marketing campaign
Your marketing funnel is basically just a roadmap of Buyer’s journey.
How to develop the Marketing Funnel of my Business?
Sprout Social explains how the marketing funnel works very simply. However, each company has its unique Funnel.
Now you see why having a well defined Customer Persona is important – You need to map out their behavior from Awareness stage all the way to Purchase, repectively.
By understanding the behavior of users (website visitors) you may identify the pages were the users fall out of the funnel.
We know for a fact, these stages of the funnel don’t match the buyer’s journey!
Hence, you must study these pages, research their behavior, click through rates, bounce rates, unique visitors ratio, conversion rate, session time, etc.
You can find more information by studying Behavior Reports from Google Academy.
Google Analytics is a great free tool. How is that for low-budget marketing campaigns!
Phu Tip for Fixing your Funnel:
Working on many marketing campaigns with a small budget in the past, we have found out that most of the user drop out (or bounce out) from the funnel occurs in the final 2 stages.
For instance, this happens not because the User is not interested in your offer, but actually they are having poor User Experience at these last stages!
According to multiple sources, over 50% of e-commerce website traffic comes from Mobile Devices!
Are your Website and Cart optimized to facilitate the best UX across all devices?
Indeed, there is a reason why Amazon is dominating E-commerce. It is offer the BEST USER EXPERIENCE that fully matches the buyer’s journey online and their expectations from the platform!
STEP 3 – Choose Your Communication Channel for a low-budget marketing campaign
Undoubtedly, there are many communication channels you can use to get your message delivered to your target market; free of charge or at a very low cost.
Some of the most popular marketing channels are:
- Search Engines (organic and paid search)
- Social Media Platforms (organic and paid reach)
- Direct Mail
- Your own Digital Assets (Web Sites, Blog, Landing Pages)
- Influencers
Low-budget marketing campaigns require you to focus your financial energy on a single channel!
Even so, allocating a small budget for a single marketing channel, that doesn’t mean you should forget about other communication tools…
Here are some examples of ways you can communicate with your audience free of charge:
- Mailchimp for Email Campaigns
- SurveyMonkey for Market Research Campaigns
- Landing Pages for Branded Messages delivered at different stages of the funnel (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc.)
- Blogs – as part of your Owned Media
- Social Media Pages – engage with your audience’s content; like, comment, re-share
- Micro-influencers – you may leverage small audience influencers and in turn offer them products and services for free
Phu Tip for Small and Medium Businesses:
Many of our clients are not aware how important is their website as a digital asset.
Essentially, your website is your the most important marketing message you can communicate to your audience.
If you are running low-budget for marketing campaigns, then go back to your assets and make sure your website is doing its job properly!
That is why it is important to have an excellent website, custom-built for your Niche market and specialized to reciprocate the buyer’s journey.
STEP 4 – Choosing the Campaign Model
Every stage of the funnel is unique. So the campaign models for each marketing funnel are different.
Facebook Ads
One of the most cost-effective marketing campaigns available to businesses today are Facebook Ads.
Check out some examples of creative and good Facebook Ads.
Overall, the process of developing a Facebook Ad isn’t as simple as at appears on the feed. Actually, the process is quite lengthy and has many stages.
Phu Tip for Facebook Ads:
Here at Phu Concepts, we use A/B testing, or split testing to achieve best results. We advice the same to our customers.
Basically, you shouldn’t rely on 1 Ad Template. Instead, use multiple Ad templates (as different campaigns) to test different marketing messages and learn what resonates with your target audience.
Finally, we help you avoid some mistakes in running your Facebook Ads, but also Social Media Ads, generally.
Google Ads
There are many types of Google Ads (Paid Search Advertisement). Most common are PPC (pay per click). And these are, by far, the best low-budget marketing campaigns for your business.
Some examples of Google Ad examples are:
- Expanded text Ads
- Ad Extensions
- Product Listings
Phu Tip for Google Ads:
According to smart insights and Hootsuite, 81% of online users have used a search engine to search for a product they wanted to buy.
Clearly, the most dominant Search Engine is Google, of course.
Using Google Ads for your marketing campaign will help you understand your customers in a very thorough and exact fashion.
As you will be able to tap into the biggest portion of online traffic and the widest possible audience for a relatively low price.
It should be noted that even if this is a very low-budget marketing campaigns, it is crucial and all companies use it at some point, if not constantly.
Phu Concepts recommends this marketing campaign and advises clients to use Google Analytics to analyze all the traffic drawn from Paid Search. But Also, to A/B test your messages and study the different effects!
Therefore, by completing this marketing campaign, you will posses information that will allow you to conduct new campaigns even more effectively than ever before!
attributions:
Background vector created by freepik – www.freepik.com
