8 Ways to Save Cost when Promoting your Business online

In this post, I’ll be sharing very practical ways Small Businesses Can Save Digital Marketing Cost And Get More Returns.

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Running a small business in Nigeria is definitely not a stroll in the park. The business terrain in Nigeria comes with its own peculiar challenges.

Whether you’re running the small business as a side hustle or running it full time, you need to consider taking digital marketing seriously if you want that business to thrive in this digital age.

If you have some marketing funds to spare for your small business, there are some affordable digital marketing options you can consider. And if you don’t, there are still some ways to get your small business thriving in the digital space here in Nigeria.

The goal here is to help your small business get more returns on marketing investment (either in terms of money spent or efforts expended).

READ:4 Money Habits You Should Develop

Important Facts to Note

According to NCC, 140 million Nigerians use mobile phones (as at September 2017), while 98.39 million Nigerians actively use internet users, and just approximately 54% of internet users are able to access the internet on a daily basis.

It’s also interesting to note that just approximately 12% of those who use internet daily have active social media accounts (as revealed by Hootsuite in its “The Global State of Digital in 2019 Report”), with WhatsApp taking the first position as the most used social media platform in Nigeria.

StartCounter also revealed that approximately 74% of that total use Facebook in Nigeria, approximately 12% use Twitter, 10% use Pinterest, 2% use Instagram and lastly, approximately 2% also use YouTube.

All these should signal, to a smart small business owner here in Nigeria, that there’s definitely some goldmine in the digital space for their business.

8 Helpful Tips for Saving Digital Marketing Cost and Getting More Returns

Before diving to the saving tips below, it is very important for small business owners to first understand their target audience.

This is very critical if you do want to be able to get more returns on your marketing investment. If not, you will keep promoting the business to the wrong audience without getting your desired results.

Secondly, small business owners need to determine what their marketing budget is. Every time you make sale, always set aside a certain percentage of profit made (after deducting all other expenses) for marketing the business.

Having a budget will help guide you on the kind of digital marketing options that will be most effective and within the budget that you have, so that you don’t financially strain the business. In addition, small business owners can easily calculate both the cost of acquiring a new customer and the life time value of each.

Now, let’s dive into the tips… (If you need help with any of the tips mentioned below, send an email to desforby.nigeria@gmail.com, they will be willing to work something out for you. All the best)

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For small business with no marketing funds to spare, these are some digital marketing options that you can consider to get more returns:

• Get active on social media

If you aren’t talking about your business online, who will? And the perfect place to start doing that is on social media. Looking at the reports mentioned above, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube are the top social media networking platform here in Nigeria.

Take your time to understand how each platform works, and the type of content that thrives the most on each platform. Then develop a content strategy peculiar to your brand, use relevant hashtags to increase engagement (likes, comments, followers).

There are quite a number of apps that you can use to schedule posts on social media to make it super easy for you to focus on other things. Ensure your DMs (direct messages) are open so that people can easily reach out to you online.

• Create a Referral marketing program

Referral marketing is also known as word-of-mouth marketing. It is still one of the most effective and cost-free marketing strategy till date.

You can create a simple unique code and give anyone interested in referring people to the service or products your business offers, while they get a certain commission off or you give them something in return for their referral.

The terms of agreement are up to both the business owner and the referrer. You can encourage referrers to also use their social media platforms too, to get the word out about your business and increase their chances of getting more commission.

• Get Listed on Various Directories and listings website in Nigeria

There are quite a number of directories that you can list your business on for free. Like Google My Business, Vconnect, Connect Nigeria, Finelib, the popular Jiji and more! This gives the business more visibility online, especially on search engines like Google.

These websites, over time, have gained a lot of attention from search engine through the quality of traffic that they get, and this can open the business up to new and more organic target audience, that it wasn’t probably getting enough of on other digital marketing platforms.

• Run a Blog

It absolutely does cost you much to run a blog, especially with free blogging platform like WordPress and co. Publishing relevant content on a blog about the products or services you offer is a smart way to connect your target audience to the business.

With this you can help the target audience make faster buying decisions. You can also use the blog to collect relevant contact details, like emails, which you can use to reach those who show interest in the business.

You can also open an account on Nairaland too, a public forum, and share various content detailing your products or services if you don’t want to run a blog, or own a website yet.

• Collect and Send Out Emails Regularly

This is one of the very cheap ways to market your business using this digital platform. Small business owners that don’t have a lot of email contacts can run email campaigns on platforms like MailChimp, Sendpulse and many other platforms free of charge.

MailChimp released a very interesting report about the percentage of open and click through rate, based on different industries, for emails sent on their platforms. And they discovered that Creative Services/Agency had 21.59% open rate, Beauty and Personal Care had 17.01% open rate while Marketing and Advertising had 16.48% open rate.

This further highlight that emails remains a very powerful tool for businesses to increase sales. And what’s more interesting is that they don’t have to pay to use most of these platforms, especially if they have less then 2000 email subscribers. (read full report here)

For small business with a little marketing funds to spare, these are some digital marketing options that you can consider to get more returns (in addition to the ones mentioned above).

• Outsource to Digital Marketing Experts or Companies

There are quite a few digital marketing experts (individuals) and companies that help cater to small businesses, with the understanding that their marketing budget is always smaller than that of bigger businesses.

You will find a lot of them at digital marketing events and on Instagram— but you have to be extra careful. When considering to outsource your digital marketing to a person or company, it is very important that you do your research well before going ahead. Find clients they have worked with to verify that they can actually do the things they are promising to do. You can reach out to such named clients to be sure that they are not fictitious.

Outsourcing to Digital Marketing Experts, or Companies, can help you save time and focus on getting your desired results, since they are very familiar with the digital marketing trends and changes that will improve the outcome of the marketing campaign.

• Run Promoted Ads on Social Media and Spend on the Most Effective Platforms

Referring to the reports revealed by NCC, Hootsuite and StartCounter above, we can see the importance of social media.

With Facebook and Instagram, just about anyone with little or no skills running online ads can quickly setup their account and start promoting their business on these platforms in seconds.

Other platforms might be a little tricky, so if you don’t have time to spare to understand how they run ads on these platforms, you can outsource that to an expert.

And when running ads, be sure to promote on platforms that your target audience are on. You can run several ads on selected social media platforms to see the ones that are most effective, then you can focus more on promoting on those platforms.

• Create an Affiliate Marketing Program

Creating an affiliate marketing program is a very good sales strategy that allows small business to leverage on the smaller network of others who have interest in their service or product. With this smaller network businesses can get more people talking about them through affiliate marketing.

Just like referral marketing, affiliate marketing is one very good digital marketing strategy that a small business can use to get more return on marketing investment.

With this, the businesses are not actually the ones marketing, rather they select people they want to share a percentage of their profit with when they are able to get people within their network to use the businesses’ product or service.

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