When launching an online business, if you are to have any success at all, then you must put a portion of your funds aside for marketing your business and website. This is crucial, because without a proper marketing plan you can have the best products in your niche, but you still won’t make much money.
Coming up with a marketing plan is also important because it will allow you to make the most of your marketing budget. For example, you wouldn’t want to spend all of your budget on only one single type of traffic generation method. A safer play is to spread the budget across different traffic generation methods. For more information on the different traffic types out there visit “What are types of Digital Marketing Traffic?”.
Do Your Research On What’s Cheap
When spending your marketing budget, don’t just simply think that the quicker you spend it the quicker your website will have an increase in traffic. You need to make the most of a marketing budget by knowing where the cheapest options are. For example, when setting up an Adwords campaign you can spend $100 on 100 clicks if you target very popular keywords that cost $1 per click. Or you can take the time to do some keyword research and come up with equally effective keyword phrases that cost only 10 cents per click. That means you will have 1,000 clicks for the same $100 that you spend. By being smart about your approach to spending your budget you can do much more, and that is only going to increase your bottom line.
Furthermore, if you plan on hiring an SEO service or even a complete online marketing company then you must do your research. Opting for a very cheap service can be counterproductive because they may be completely incompetent. On the other hand, if you aren’t careful then you could end up spending a fortune on a service that is not much better than a far cheaper one.
SEO Marketing Plan
Doing SEO involves doing a vast number of tasks, such as creating high quality content, guest posting, leaving comments on high authority sites with do-follow links and so on. You need to come up with a plan and stick with it, because otherwise, you might get off track, this is because SEO takes a long time, and if you get overwhelmed it is easy to decrease your efforts as time goes on. Therefore, you need to make a checklist where you do a certain amount of work each day towards achieving your SEO goals. For example, you could, per week, do: 5 articles, 10 guests posts, 25 comments on authority sites and so on. Every week each of the tasks need to be completed until the quota is met.
If there are any tasks that take too much of your time then you can get them outsourced at places like oDesk and Elance. There you will find many people looking for work that can perform many SEO related tasks for a cheap amount of money. This is a great way to stretch a marketing budget if you aren’t prepared to pay the money for an expensive SEO service. The only caveat with this approach is that you must learn the basic SEO principles yourself and then instruct the workers you hire very specially on what it is that you need them to do.
You Marketing Plan Needs To Change As Time Goes On
It is crucial that your marketing plan changes as your business grows, because if it doesn’t then your business will have a hard time expanding beyond a particular point. Don’t think of marketing as something that you need to do for a certain period of time and then you can just stop. It is a process that needs to be given special attention to for as long as you want your business to stay viable. Therefore, as soon as you begin to get a decent turnover you need to re-invest some of that back into your business in the form of marketing. This might be in the form of spending more on your advertising campaign, or getting more marketing videos created from a video production company.
That in turn should increase your sales further, and consequently that increase in sales should result to an increase in marketing spending. This is an ongoing cycle that needs to be well balanced, because spend too little and you are hindering your growth, but spend too much and you could begin to have cash flow problems.
Identify What Money Can Be Spent On
The person responsible for spending on marketing needs to keep up to date on what marketing channels are available out there. For example, there might be a new social media website that has gained success in the last few months and offers a great marketing opportunity. However, if you don’t know this then you will never make that investment. It is important to always be on the lookout for new ways to invest your money and if you don’t then you are missing out on opportunities to grow your business.
You must also be aware of the different content types that are out there, because utilizing the different types is important to for a comprehensive marketing plan. For example, by simply posting one article on your website is a form of marketing in itself, because you will get traffic from search engines as a result of that article, and you could even get that article published on authority websites, which in turn can drive a flood of traffic. For more information on the different content types check out our other article titled “Types of Digital Content”.
With so many marketing opportunities out there you can very quickly get overwhelmed and spend your marketing budget on the wrong things, which is why you need to have a plan of attack that maximizes your budget. For more information on marketing your business online download our “Small Business Digital Marketing Checklist”. It’s got advice and tips that you will find easy to understand and implement.
SEO Consultant Roger Bryan