4 Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Ideas for SMEs

As the owner of a small business, or an entrepreneur just starting out, you have to wear many hats and take on different roles. Your time is precious and stretched thin, which means marketing can fall to the wayside.

You don’t need to have a massive budget to effectively market your business, you just need to be smart about which channels you use. NOT marketing isn’t an option – you can’t grow your business and support sales without digital marketing.

Here are our inexpensive marketing ideas:

Mine the email marketing goldmine

Email Marketing is the perfect way to communicate with your audience. It allows you to stay top-of-mind, reinforce your messaging, remain competitive, and is a tool for driving traffic where you want it to go. The beauty of email marketing – when executed correctly – is that it is one of the most cost-effective marketing methods and offers one of the highest ROI.

Get socially savvy

Social media is free to use and is a great way to market your product or service. Everyone is on social media, and that includes your target market. Facebook is South Africa’s most popular social platform, and the number of Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn users rise every day. LinkedIn is especially important to use if you are a B2B brand.

While social media is free to use, we highly recommend that you put some budget aside for the online platforms. You can create ads on Facebook and Instagram with Facebook’s Ads Manager, which an easy-to-use advertising tool. Organic media is dying, and even a boosted post or an ad with as little as R200 behind it can make all the difference.

To get you started, we offer a DIY Social Media Starter Kit, as well as free social media audits for those who have already created their accounts but need a little help in improving their social media presence.

It’s time to get a website

If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur without a website, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities and potential new clients. You don’t need to go all out on your website, either, if you can’t afford all the bells and whistles just yet. A simple one-page website can look professional, beautiful, and be functional. You can always add more pages and update it once you have more money, but this is a step you can’t skip. Why?

• It’s an opportunity to reach a wider audience.
• It’ll be the first impression prospects will have of your business, so this is your chance to make it a great one.
• A website offers your target audience 24-hour accessibility to your business. They can find your contact information and learn more about you at any time.
• If you set up an e-commerce website, anyone from anywhere in the world at any given time can purchase your products. You aren’t restricted to brick and mortar and opening hours.

It’s the investment that keeps on giving!

Be your own graphic designer

Good design is absolutely necessary for digital marketing as the online space favours beautiful imagery and engaging video. Canva is a great free-to-use platform if you can’t afford a graphic designer and all the fancy editing software they require. Canva allows you to produce images, video, animation, and other graphics, all in the specific formatting and sizing that you may require for your different marketing and business needs.

The drag-and-drop interface is incredibly easy to use, and offers thousands of free templates, fonts, colours, and graphics. You can also upload your own brand colours, logos, fonts, images, and video to edit.

With these strategies in place you can market your business without breaking the bank! Until next time. 🙂