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Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

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Guest post by Christopher Mohs

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Remarketing: The number-one tactic I often see small-businesses leaving behind is remarketing. This is the process of tagging people that visit your website and then remarketing to them based on what they may have viewed. There are two primary ways to deploy remarketing by using backend website coding that is installed to track what users are viewing so you can reach out to them with display ads from Google or post boost in Facebook and Instagram. Google Remarketing with the Google Remarketing Tag and Facebook Remarketing which utilizes Facebook’s Pixel code are the most widely used. These allow you to deploy better targeted display ads across Google’s display network and targeted social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.

You can manage campaigns in a highly robust way directly via Google Adwords or Facebook’s ad platforms. But this does take skill, know-how and a bit of elbow grease to get great results and maximize your marketing spend.

Power your display and social remarketing efforts through email marketing: Another tactic we find to be underutilized is email marketing. By far, these activities are the most productive and least expensive ways to interact with prospective and existing customers. Platforms like MailChimp have made tremendous advances in the past few years with support for automation and integration with several ecommerce services to make email marketing a breeze.

Today, MailChimp even supports integrations that tie remarketing efforts for both Google and Facebook (described above) with your email marketing efforts into one seamless package. The solution and platform is by far our service of choice for small businesses.

The process of setting remarketing campaigns and coordinated email marketing efforts is difficult for many DIY small business marketers and business owners, however engaging with an agency that specializes in small business support is a great first investment if you need the extra help.

Leveraging look-a-like audiencesThis is the process where platforms such as Google Adwords and Facebook leverage your existing customer list to identify new customers that closely match the similarities in your existing audience. As you can imagine, these individuals are far more likely to engage with your message over a general wide-cast net of “men and women from 25-45 who live within 20 miles of my business”.

Look-a-like audiences help you cast a targeted net to attract new customers in a way that yields great results.

Final Notes: Before diving into using these tactics, small businesses should be ready to commit to the following:

  • Make it easy to maintain a database of current and prospective customers to build your email marketing list. Consider opportunities to win a service each month by dropping in your business card, or deploy customer feedback cards with a promise to get specials and discounts.
  • Treat your customers more like fans. Engage with them and encourage them to share. This is especially critical with Instagram and Facebook.
  • Automate, automate, automate. Tools like MailChimp help you make almost any marketing activity automated. Birthday messages, stop back in reminders, thank you for frequent visits or follow up for a “how are we doing” review.
  • Commit to being consistent and ready to maintain a campaign. You can’t just go hard and heavy for three months and then die off and go silent. Any good digital marketing campaign requires consistent and constant attention and activity.
  • Organize your website in a way that allows you to easily identify customer segments and to customize the remarketing message.
    • i.e. If you are a restaurant, split your breakfast, lunch, and dinner messages onto separate pages to easily identify the visiting intent of a customer. If you are a salon, separate men’s, women’s, and children’s haircut services to speak more to the scheduling and style needs of the customer.