Expenses should be minimized to reserve the resources to others. For small businesses, marketing budgets are usually tight. To maximize profitability, each and every marketing expenses should be allocated effectively.
There are a lot of ways for marketing your business on the internet, and each can be either useful or painful. Since there is no single answer for a successful marketing strategy, you must do thorough research on what strategy is best for you.
Setting up your goal is the first thing to do. With analytics software, you can measure your website's source and quantity of leads/sales. By comparing your website's sources of traffic and social media channels, you can find which source generates the majority of sales.
By knowing it, you can tune up your budget to that specific source, and craft your strategy for it. Identify your top 20 percent traffic sources that generate 80 percent of expected results (The Pareto Principle (80–20 rule).
Control and Target
Since there are many answers for a single problem, you should know which answer can give you the most control. Not every marketing solutions that are available allow you to take full control on how much is spent and who is targeted.
For a limited budget, you can spread your budget to a large variety of platform, but choose only those that give you full control on both targeting and cost. The most popular method is using popular advertising giants such as Google, Bing and Facebook.
The more control you have, the more effective your expenses are. You can also better predict how many people would be engaged with the sum of money you spent, and this will give you more power to understand customer's behavior.
And the more money you can save, the more you can get rid of other marketing strategies that don't work to focus on your limited resources to enhance your website's credibility, and your offline strategies.
Scale When Profitable
Targeting your marketing campaign on the internet is getting easier. But any marketing campaign done by small businesses should start on a small scale with narrow targeting. The narrower your target is, the easier you can achieve your goal.
Once you find that your campaign is profitable, you can then scale your campaign up to reach a broader audience. Experimenting with different campaign on the same platform can give you insight about which strategy works best for your business.
You should also consider the importance of having a statistical relevance in results before deciding on whether to scale up your investment or not. Always support your decision with enough data insights.
Scaling consumes time and money. For small businesses with strict budget, scaling your marketing campaign is necessary only when you find it worth your resources.
Spread Your Effort Across the Internet
For businesses, each money spent on marketing methods should deliver the same message with the time it wasted in delivering it. The same goes to small businesses.
There are many channels and platforms available on the internet. Some are paid and some are free for you to use. For small businesses, you can initiate your strategy by using free services to expand your reach. Social media networks, forums, Q&A websites and many more. Take your time to see which platform and channels can deliver your message best.
The more places your business resides, the more your business is exposed. And the more it's exposed, the higher the chance you can make your business go viral.
Re-marketing and Re-targeting
Small businesses' websites tend to have less traffic that larger and more popular ones. To make use of that small number, you need to re-market and re-target your potential customers.
Your business website is your official online presence. Social media networks and others are complementary that boost your marketing efforts and attracting people's attention. Re-marketing and re-targeting will help you convert those people that you have successfully engage, but did not convert to buyers yet.
You can re-market and re-target your products and/or services to your potential customers using different platform (cross-channel re-marketing/re-targeting). This will boost the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Conclusion
You shouldn't be afraid to start small. All businesses started from somewhere, and at that time they were small. Since internet marketing is the spearhead of business marketing on the internet, there is no saying what you can achieve tomorrow from what you do today.
Further reading: Ahead in the Virtual World