New age ways to market on a shoestring budget!
At a college level, when you are planning a college festival or have a start-up idea, you probably don’t have the large marketing budgets that a multinational corporation does. However, with the growth of digital media and other new-age tools, marketing today is more about content and vitality than about large budgets.
Here are some strategies to get your point across to your audience at an affordable budget!
- Target your audience: kick-off your campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Snapchat. Each of these platforms is unique and targets a different audience. Boosting of posts on Facebook helps you target and reach your desired audience. Google AdWords and Youtube ads are other tools which allow you to target a particular audience and demographic. Google AdWords is a flexible marketing platform which allows you to focus on people who are searching for what you have to offer. With the share of marketing budgets spent on social media expected to more than double over the next five years, from 11% today to 24% by 2020 (The CMO Survey), it is becoming a large share of wallet for marketeers!
- Content is king: exciting content that users can learn from will help your brand or idea gain recognition. blogging, videos, podcasts, webinars, writing articles can all help. You can plan and coordinate relevant sponsorships depending on the theme of your event or festival. For example, if your event is a business plan competition, you can have a large company tie-up with you on case study ideas! Product placement in your content will help subsidize your campaign.
- Think out-of-the-box: Students and small businesses with restricted budgets tend to use creative guerilla marketing ideas in order establish their brand name. Some examples include – graffiti competitions; which help create awareness by decorating a wall at campus, flash mobs; which can help attract attention in crowded place like shopping malls etc. Stage a mannequin challenge or plan an event to create awareness about your festival or society.
- Email/ SMS marketing: send out a teaser of your product/ festival via email. work smart and use tools such as Mailchimp and Mailmerge, which help you send out emails to a mass audience. Mailchimp allows you to create campaigns and analyse how well the campaign performed by seeing an in-depth report that includes statistics such as total clicks, bounce rate and clicks per unique opens. You can use email lists to spread news about your business and industry, festival, products and build up your brand name and value. Besides email marketing, SMS marketing is also an effective way to reach out to potential customers. It is instantaneous, flexible in terms of deliverability, has a high conversion rate and an extremely high open rate of as much as 98% !
Creating worthwhile content, effective use of social media, creating email lists, strategic SMS marketing and thinking out-of-the-box can help you grow your business or gain sponsorship on a limited budget. As a college student looking to promote a festival or event at college, these nifty tricks can help you market your service or product even on a shoestring budget!
Link to the published article: http://bit.ly/2j6bPq7
