4 Ways to Stay on Top of Rising Marketing Costs
Hiring a marketing professional is expensive, but if you don’t know how to create and handle an online marketing strategy, what option do you have left? Before you hand over your hard-earned money, consider these four tips for saving money on marketing.
1. Learn How to Do It Yourself
Let’s say you need to come up with more marketing ideas for veterinarians. Your first thought may be to hire a professional to work out a marketing campaign for you. If you dedicate a little time to research, though, you may be able to skip over hiring someone altogether. Or, if you still want someone to take the reins, you’ll at least have a good idea of what you need to ask them for. That way, you won’t get talked into additional services that you really don’t need. Educate yourself enough to make informed decisions.
2. Familiarize Yourself With SEO and Hashtags
One of the major roadblocks for business owners is SEO – most people don’t know what SEO is, how to find the best SEO for their business, or how to utilize that SEO once they do have a list of keywords. SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and it helps to get traffic to certain web pages and social media profiles. That way, people will find your site when they search for your services. SEO isn’t as complex as you may think it is. Instead of hiring someone to do SEO research, you can use Google’s free SEO tool yourself.
3. Setup Social Media Accounts
Social media marketing is huge and it’s 99% free. Take the time to learn how to set up social media profiles yourself so you won’t have to hire someone to do it for you. If you have time in your schedule, you can also set aside a bit of time every day to market via social media, which can save you upwards of $100 each week. If you feel overwhelmed by the pressure of posting regularly on social media, consider scaling back either the number of social media sites your company uses or lengthening the time between your posts. It’s definitely preferable to put out quality content with some regularity on a few social media outlets than use all of them to constantly post drivel.
4. Lower the Cost of Direct Marketing
There are still some old-school marketing techniques that work, such as sending postcards like the ones you can find here: http://www.dentalmarketing.net/dental-postcard-gallery/. The key to using these types of direct marketing tactics is to find the more inexpensive options. Often, printing companies have regular sales – sign up for their e-mail notifications so you can stay on top of their special offers. Also consider targeting your direct marketing efforts more narrowly. Instead of frequently sending mailers to everyone in your market, try selecting a niche market to focus on and choose a few strategic times in the year to reach out to them.
You may feel like having a heart-attack every time you look at your marketing budget. You can fix that stress by applying these 4 ideas to control the bloat and still get great results for your company.
