Marketing is an essential part of any SME’s business – especially if you are just starting out.
Marketing is a way to get your name out there, attract new customers, convert prospects into buyers, and build a base of loyal customers who will carry your business through thick and thin.
All in all, marketing is worth it — and it pays to do it well. But of course, marketing comes with its own challenges, not the least of which is the fact that it can be expensive.
Many SMB owners are willing to grit their teeth and pay the ultimate price for good marketing. Finally, marketing campaigns can generate a fantastic ROI in terms of profit made. However, if you are concerned about cash flow, you should try to make your marketing as cost-effective as possible.
With the right marketing strategies and the best software running in the background, it’s possible to make your campaigns more efficient without spending too much. By using clever, targeted tactics and consistently engaging your user base, you can achieve meaningful campaign results with relatively little effort.
How? Let’s take a look.
Collaborate with influencers and brand ambassadors
In terms of marketing efficiency, influencer marketing has a massive advantage over branded posts. Why? Influencers have incredible reach and engaged followers who trust their recommendations.
The best influencers also master digital storytelling, enabling them to create compelling, engaging content that resonates with audiences.
Nevertheless, it is important that you address the right influencer as a brand ambassador. Pick someone who is likely to appeal to your target customers.
To do this, analyze your customer metrics and determine what (and who) your customers are likely to find appealing, informative, or just plain entertaining. Go through your marketing data, CRM and customer service data to better understand who your customers are and what they want.
It’s also worth investing in an ERP system, as it can connect all of your data assets together, making it that much easier to capture, collate and understand your customers’ activities in a meaningful way. You can then use your insights to identify the perfect influencer for your brand and which products to focus on.
Promote training and education
Your people are your best resource – and a more efficient marketing team means more efficient marketing.
Training and education may seem expensive, but it’s worth the investment. A talented, well-trained marketing team can increase your marketing ROI exponentially.
The implementation of training courses should not be an isolated case either. Marketing is constantly evolving. Therefore, marketers need to keep their finger on the pulse of industry trends and events.
Regular retraining and further education keep your marketers up to date on current marketing trends. This, in turn, allows them to work at the top of their industry.
Focus on SEO
SEO is an extremely efficient and inexpensive way to increase your company’s online visibility. With an effective SEO strategy, you can climb to the top of Google search rankings with relative ease.
It’s a simple equation: since Google is often the first port of call people turn to when looking for a product or service, the more Googleable your business is, the more leads you’ll attract.
To improve your SEO, you need to consider the following:
- Produce quality content
- Interaction with the online audience
- Have a solid, reputable online presence
- Keep your social media up to date
- Use keywords in your online content
- Stay up to date on algorithm changes and SEO trends
Work with complementary companies
Building a network is a fantastic way to establish your brand without straining your marketing budget.
If you find a company that complements your own business, partnering with them for content campaigns and other messaging could be a win-win.
For example, let’s say you sell cookware. A company that manufactures or sells cooking ingredients could be a fantastic partner. Together, you could create recipe blog posts, video tutorials, and culinary tips about your cookware and its ingredients, all at a relatively low cost.
You can then publish that content across your brand’s platforms and theirs, doubling your reach in one fell swoop.
Again, the companies you work with need to be relevant to your business. For example, if your cookware manufacturer works with an art supply store, customers will have a hard time seeing the connection between the two. After all, art enthusiasts don’t go to a creative blog for cooking tips, and neither do your customers expect to find painting guides on your social media channels!
With this in mind, look for companies with a customer base that is likely to be interested in your products and vice versa.
Encourage user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) can have a big impact.
A good UGC campaign can simultaneously boost engagement, strengthen brand/customer relationships and significantly increase your reach.
Let’s look at a simple but very successful example.
In 2022, Shakira released a track featuring the Black Eyed Peas. After being out of the mainstream for a while and looking to make a big comeback, Shakira made waves with this new title, calling out to fans old and new.
Their #girllikeme challenge invited TikTokker to recreate the complex dance from the “Girl Like Me” music video. TikTok couldn’t resist and exploded with dance videos. In response, Shakira posted compilations of the best, most imaginative, funniest, and likeable movies on her Instagram account.
The result was that the title received a tremendous boost in performances and popularity. In addition, the hashtag had almost 500 million views and Shakira was catapulted back into mainstream media.
You may not be Shakira, but you can still create a memorable, wide-ranging marketing campaign by promoting UGC challenges, hashtags, etc.
Think of ways to challenge customers to get creative with your products and share the results, whether it’s through fun ways to reuse packaging or fun photos of pets using your product.
Contests are also a great way to motivate users to create content. The price of awarding an award is worth the ROI of a successful UGC campaign.
Reuse or update old campaigns
You don’t want to come up with the same old ideas. But at the same time, there’s little point in changing a formula for success just for the sake of it.
If an ongoing campaign is working well, keep using it. If a particular message or campaign has worked well in the past, update and reuse it.
Even if you can’t recycle them, old campaigns are a great resource. Historical campaign data can provide useful insights into what resonates with your customers and what doesn’t.
If you want to be thorough, you should compare your campaign data with historical customer and sales data. This allows you to do a deeper analysis and helps you find out why certain campaigns were successful.
Use tools like cloud ERP software to do this. This gives you access to the data you need, but being a cloud-based solution also allows everyone on the team to access the data from anywhere.
This allows the marketing team to easily correlate campaign data with metrics such as customer satisfaction, conversion rate, and complaints. It’s also great for collaborating with other departments in real time, so you can access historical data to make better decisions, even when you’re on the go.
However, it is important to be proactive in this regard. It’s not enough to simply produce the same old campaigns because they used to work.
Customer tastes change quickly. Even if you think a campaign is still as relevant and engaging as it was before, it’s still important to adapt it to today’s market.
Use referral marketing
This is often confused with word of mouth and UGC marketing. Although there is some overlap between the three, referral marketing is so different that it deserves its own category.
Referral marketing is a direct incentive for the customer to acquire new customers. In a typical example, a brand offers its customers a reward—often cashback, a gift card, a rebate, or a free gift—if they convince a friend to sign up for your service.
It’s worth noting that referral marketing is more commonly used by companies that offer services rather than selling products. These companies need customers to actively sign up for an ongoing brand/customer relationship, rather than simply buying a new product when needed. However, it can also work for product providers.
To ensure customers are rewarded appropriately for referrals, set up a referral link system. When someone signs up using a client’s referral link, your ERP software or other system will automatically record the details so everyone gets their referral bonus.
Efficient marketing campaigns don’t have to be expensive. With careful planning, clear customer insights, an effective ERP system and clever strategies, you can run great campaigns with excellent ROI with very little initial effort.
Digital channels offer tremendous opportunities to leverage your network and engage your customer base in a brand-building way without breaking your budget.
You certainly get what you pay for in terms of staff, graphics, etc. However, marketing effectiveness is more about knowing where and when to spend the money. It’s about being strategic and insightful and not hoping for money to speak.
With the right approach, you can achieve high levels of marketing efficiency and fantastic ROI — and you don’t have to increase marketing spend to get it.
