Marketing is very expensive especially when businesses are looking for expansion or for a significant increase in their transactions in a short period of time.

A natural growth on the steady phase may not be that expensive, but when a business is expecting aggressive growth despite its current state in terms of business credibility both off-line and on the internet the marketing expenses may all seem very high as digital markets may have to deal,

• with the products that work and that doesn’t
• The conversion rates vary from product to product and the same calculation across all categories may not be viable
• The marketing expenses also vary from region to region and business may see the actual heat when they are looking for expansion
• Competition varies for keywords, categories, and others

Also business especially which are not funded will be very concerned about the ROI calculations (return on the investments), despite knowing the long-term advantages or outcome still business cannot invest when there is no immediate ROI, as businesses cannot sustain without immediate returns.

Considering all of the above cases, age of the business, their internet presence, their marketing budgets and credibility if we go with the usual activities there will be an utter loss or businesses may not survive and hence here are few suggestions or the marketing strategies those can be followed by the non funded organizations or startups.

Let’s take the example of some new business which has started with Google AdWords in order to see some quick progress happening.

Let’s hear from the business owner, the business owner started complaining that the returns are minimal or there is no return at all or sometimes its in negative.

Here is what is exactly happening!

Google maintains certain pricing regardless of the product price and hence Google would charge a basic CPC (cost per click) lets say 1 USD and when he has to drive 100 people to sell 5 products the cost per acquisition will be 20 USD but in some case the actual profits made by selling the products itself will be 10 or 20 USD and in that case he makes no profit or sometimes he will be in loss and these kinds of marketing just helps to show the transaction count but the return will be zero. In case if he prefers to show some count he can continue with the paid marketing at the same budgets or slightly reduce and have budgets only on the campaigns/categories/products those work.

The cost per acquisition may be high due to

• The website has the support of no other channels
• The website may have not been promoted so far
• May not have got optimized completely from SEO, Marketing and Product features/usability perspective

Despite this problem, if you have to achieve your targets we suggest following the below strategy,

Here is a brief on improving the transactions at minimal spends without any hit on the margins.

SEO On-page, Off-page and site level:

(Objective to make website rank up on Google first page to as many keywords as possible, these will be in few thousands)

• Upload lots of content across all the potential web pages (categories/products)
• Customize the Meta tags (Titles & descriptions) for all the potential categories/products
• In order to make the content perform over the competition you have to build a decent number of backlinks from various credible domains
• Optimize all the web pages for the conversions
• Optimize website/web pages in order to improve the user experience
• Optimize the website to improve the crawl frequency and crawl rate
• Work on all site level implementations
• Optimize the web pages for better CTR’s

Content Marketing:

(Selling products through content users are interested in, this also improves conversion rates of traffic coming from another channel:

• Initiate the content marketing activities and develop lots of articles which may get published on your own blog or portal other than yours.
  • g: Writing an article about the best hardware stores in the USA and this article will have a list of all hardware stores, but with some unidentifiable positive tone about your business, whereas to users it seems to be like a information. We suggest lots of such content.
  • Promote all this well-written content across the internet or on various platforms such as FB, LinkedIn, Quora and more.

Local Business Optimization:

(gets lots of phone calls, improves rankings of keywords in those areas:

• Products submission on Google business listing
• You also need 1 or 2 more physical addresses for your business especially targeting the location your target customers/audiences reside, it can be a warehouse address or any other address that belongs to you and is in a different area of your city/town. It can be some house address also. (Note- Everywhere the phone numbers will be same, but then this kind of listing will show your business more on google more number of times based on the area of searches)

Display Marketing:

Gmail Ad’s– (Brings in more customers at very less CPC’s and also can rejuvenate the old customers)

• In case if we have G-mails ids of procurement heads/managers or any designations or profiles/roles collected from some source or they can be your existing customers also, you can start showing ads in their Gmail inbox

Remarketing Ad’s– To target any user who has visited your website and has not purchased a product. This again needs a small budget, the cps will be very very less compared to the search marketing CPC’s

Social Media:

Your target location audiences may be using Instagram a lot and decent FB users as well and ad’s targeting the designations have to experiment, in case if this works you should scale up.

LinkedIn paid marketing is expensive even though there is a designation targeting, and hence you can go with only organic activities.

Groups: Create groups on social media and add relevant audiences or join the existing groups which have a large number of audiences in it. Once you are part of the group you may be allowed to speak about your product/services or content and hence this may work out very well, which again may vary from category to category of business.

Affiliate Marketing:

You have to register on affiliate websites and have to set the affiliate commissions, which can be definitely set lesser than your margins.

So whenever someone sells your product you have to pay a small % of the product price or the margins, anything that’s comfortable for the business owner or mutually agreed upon by both the parties.

E.g: product price is 500 USD and the affiliate marketer sells it and we may set the commission to only 2% and in that case, you may have to pay the affiliate market 2% of the 500 USD and that is equal to 10 USD.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Consultant