5 Low-Budget Digital Marketing Strategies for SMEs
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 7:30 am
Of course, there are all kinds of SMEs, but as a general rule they tend to have fairly tight budgets. Today I am going to focus on the latter.
I don't mean that all digital marketing should have this low-budget approach, but in situations where we only have a budget for our main strategy, we can create complementary strategies with few resources, such as those I propose below.
Companies in this situation know they need to do marketing, but they are not sure where to start or how much of their budget they can or should dedicate to it . This leads them to a deadlock.
“Since I am not sure and/or the times I
telegram usa number have tried have not worked out well, I prefer to postpone the decision and dedicate my attention to the needs or emergencies of the day to day”
I think this sums up quite well the situation of a good percentage of Spanish SMEs that are in a loop from which they find it difficult to escape and something that I see every day as a marketing consultant .
How does an SME usually take the first step in digital marketing?
The most common exits for an SME are usually:
Opening a profile on the social network of the moment and starting to publish content. This still happens, but it was even more common a few years ago.
Start using your email marketing database to promote your news.
Write articles on your blog to try to attract traffic and also have content for your newsletter.
You see where my examples are going, right?
What happens with many of these initiatives? How long do they last?
In my experience, when I start mentoring SMEs, not much. They tend to be initiatives that are taken with great force, but over time or due to unforeseen circumstances they slow down and end up being abandoned.
Success depends largely on managing internal expectations and resources.
Low-budget digital marketing strategies for SMEs
As I mentioned in my article on the best digital marketing strategy for SMEs , the keys are:
Content-based strategies.
Select a channel in which we can position ourselves as experts in our sector to generate visibility and traffic volume.
Use other channels, including paid ones, to support conversions.
But specifically, what low-budget marketing strategies can I implement?
I insist on what I said at the beginning:
It's not about all of our digital marketing having this approach. The goal is that if we have a limited budget and we have the majority of it allocated to our main digital channel, we should keep in mind that other things can be done with a limited budget.
1. Guerrilla SEO
The best thing to do is to do an audit, define the SEO strategy, implement the initial changes and then grow (a very basic summary of the initial phases). But sometimes we don't have time, budget or either of the two. So what can we do?
Review of SEO basics : accessibility, brand positioning, web core vitals (loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability of the website), sitemap and robots.
Since we are thinking of something low-budget, we are going to select the 2 or 3 searches that interest us the most to work on them with everything we have: internal and external links (watch out for anchor text ), specific content (website and blog), video content answering the most frequently asked questions on Google (and related to your basic searches, of course), and support from social networks.
Local strategy : to focus on the target audience that is most likely to buy from us, we are going to work on local searches (XYZ service in Madrid), optimize company profiles and positioning on Google Maps.
2. Email marketing with existing databases
Another Achilles heel is often the database of clients and prospects. Due to the speed of our activity and lack of focus on marketing, these databases, if they exist, are often poorly structured and incomplete.
Having a database with the most basic information about our clients we can do:
Basic analysis of our client portfolio: what size they are, what services we offer them, who is the decision-maker, what product we could offer them, etc.
Business plan: With these questions answered, we can define a small business plan for:
Sell other products to active customers.
Lead recovery campaigns.
Creating our newsletter database: to improve our relationship and sales to clients and prospects, we need to be on their minds. Email marketing is one of the best tools to achieve this (as long as it is done correctly, of course).
With just these four actions we have a short -term sales strategy that, I assure you, always works.
3. Content generated with a head
Content has always been one of the pillars of digital marketing strategies and is becoming increasingly important.
We see it through organic positioning, but also through the explosion of influencer marketing since COVID ( in the USA there are more content creators than police officers, doctors and lawyers combined !).
It's one thing to think about creating content, and another to actually do it. What seems easy at first is often a considerable amount of work. That's why we have to choose our content bets carefully. It's better to start with the basics, and then grow, than to die trying.
When talking about the first strategy (SEO), I have proposed several marketing actions related to content creation. Now what I propose to you is:
I don't mean that all digital marketing should have this low-budget approach, but in situations where we only have a budget for our main strategy, we can create complementary strategies with few resources, such as those I propose below.
Companies in this situation know they need to do marketing, but they are not sure where to start or how much of their budget they can or should dedicate to it . This leads them to a deadlock.
“Since I am not sure and/or the times I
telegram usa number have tried have not worked out well, I prefer to postpone the decision and dedicate my attention to the needs or emergencies of the day to day”
I think this sums up quite well the situation of a good percentage of Spanish SMEs that are in a loop from which they find it difficult to escape and something that I see every day as a marketing consultant .
How does an SME usually take the first step in digital marketing?
The most common exits for an SME are usually:
Opening a profile on the social network of the moment and starting to publish content. This still happens, but it was even more common a few years ago.
Start using your email marketing database to promote your news.
Write articles on your blog to try to attract traffic and also have content for your newsletter.
You see where my examples are going, right?
What happens with many of these initiatives? How long do they last?
In my experience, when I start mentoring SMEs, not much. They tend to be initiatives that are taken with great force, but over time or due to unforeseen circumstances they slow down and end up being abandoned.
Success depends largely on managing internal expectations and resources.
Low-budget digital marketing strategies for SMEs
As I mentioned in my article on the best digital marketing strategy for SMEs , the keys are:
Content-based strategies.
Select a channel in which we can position ourselves as experts in our sector to generate visibility and traffic volume.
Use other channels, including paid ones, to support conversions.
But specifically, what low-budget marketing strategies can I implement?
I insist on what I said at the beginning:
It's not about all of our digital marketing having this approach. The goal is that if we have a limited budget and we have the majority of it allocated to our main digital channel, we should keep in mind that other things can be done with a limited budget.
1. Guerrilla SEO
The best thing to do is to do an audit, define the SEO strategy, implement the initial changes and then grow (a very basic summary of the initial phases). But sometimes we don't have time, budget or either of the two. So what can we do?
Review of SEO basics : accessibility, brand positioning, web core vitals (loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability of the website), sitemap and robots.
Since we are thinking of something low-budget, we are going to select the 2 or 3 searches that interest us the most to work on them with everything we have: internal and external links (watch out for anchor text ), specific content (website and blog), video content answering the most frequently asked questions on Google (and related to your basic searches, of course), and support from social networks.
Local strategy : to focus on the target audience that is most likely to buy from us, we are going to work on local searches (XYZ service in Madrid), optimize company profiles and positioning on Google Maps.
2. Email marketing with existing databases
Another Achilles heel is often the database of clients and prospects. Due to the speed of our activity and lack of focus on marketing, these databases, if they exist, are often poorly structured and incomplete.
Having a database with the most basic information about our clients we can do:
Basic analysis of our client portfolio: what size they are, what services we offer them, who is the decision-maker, what product we could offer them, etc.
Business plan: With these questions answered, we can define a small business plan for:
Sell other products to active customers.
Lead recovery campaigns.
Creating our newsletter database: to improve our relationship and sales to clients and prospects, we need to be on their minds. Email marketing is one of the best tools to achieve this (as long as it is done correctly, of course).
With just these four actions we have a short -term sales strategy that, I assure you, always works.
3. Content generated with a head
Content has always been one of the pillars of digital marketing strategies and is becoming increasingly important.
We see it through organic positioning, but also through the explosion of influencer marketing since COVID ( in the USA there are more content creators than police officers, doctors and lawyers combined !).
It's one thing to think about creating content, and another to actually do it. What seems easy at first is often a considerable amount of work. That's why we have to choose our content bets carefully. It's better to start with the basics, and then grow, than to die trying.
When talking about the first strategy (SEO), I have proposed several marketing actions related to content creation. Now what I propose to you is: