There are many ways you can improve or increase your marketing reach without having to invest a huge sum of money into advertising. In fact, there are some ways you can leverage what is already at your disposal to increase the ROI you’re getting from your marketing budget. Let’s look at some of the options that are available.
Fleet Management
Chances are, if you are running a medium or larger enterprise, you have a decent fleet of company vehicles. This might be to save on the petrol as a business expense or because your business necessitates the use of vehicles like vans to transport goods and people. If you have them rented then you can immediately reduce your costs by buying them outright, but you can also turn all vehicles into marketing powerhouses by making sure they are branded effectively. Bear in mind that, regardless of the size of the vehicle – whether it’s a smart car or a transit van – each one will garner attention from neighbors and demand attention, even when it’s waiting in traffic. You can even raise the efficiency of your fleet by using a fleet management platform, so be sure to click here to find out more information about how they can help reduce your overall spending budget.
Branded Merchandise
Regardless of the size of your business, there is something that everyone wants, which is free merch. In winter, many want hoodies, scarves, and hats and, in summer, they want shades, visors, and caps. If you have one employee or five hundred, a really good way of helping both your colleagues and your marketing potential is to invest in some high-quality merchandise that helps promote your brand. Do your employees listen to music while they work? Get them a hoodie that you can thread earphones through. The best thing is that whether they stay with the company six weeks or sixty years, they will retain those items long after they leave, carrying that brand marketing with them wherever they go. Most businesses go for pens and maybe tote bags but go bigger and you will see that branded merch doing the marketing for you wherever they, and the people gifted them, go potentially even prompting expansion opportunities later on down the track.
One of the important things in merchandising is a good merch company to work with. You need to find a reliable partner with custom products and high quality. There are many companies in the industry, but not all of them have advantages such as sustainability, low prices, fast delivery like PrinterPix, PrintBest, or CustomInk, etc.
Effective Brand Placement Ads
Do your customers mostly find you in-person or online? The last couple of years have been a bit rough on everyone but if you operate most of your business face-to-face and know your customers don’t shop online, then placing a budget on a social media or SEO ad spend isn’t going to help in the long run. Equally, if you have noticed a surge in online purchase orders since the beginning of 2024, and it doesn’t look to be disappearing any time soon, then making the most of that surge by shifting your marketing budget to a social media campaign may increase the yield of exposure you are already getting. Remember to get creative with it and, if in doubt, there are plenty of professionals in the field who can help guide you through the process of launching and curating a digital ad campaign.
Social Media
The good thing about social media is that accounts are generally free to set up and the only costs are in terms of time and energy. You can quickly build an audience, either by connecting with the audience of a company that exists already or by developing one by engaging people with the type of content you put out. There are lots of ways to interact and engage – just remember that the intention of what you put out there may be lost in translation, especially since that most social media platforms rely on text-based communication, and so nuances like intonation and sarcasm can easily be misconstrued.
The best thing about social media is that people with huge platforms and voices interact there as much as the public, so by putting yourself out there you could discover that a celebrity is already a fan of your brand, or they might be attracted to what you’re doing either via media coverage or having someone else highlight it for them. Each platform has a different set of rules in place for what and how you post, so one rule that works on Twitter, for example, may not work on Instagram. There is a lot of information out there about more niche subject matters, and if you ever get lost there are loads of experts in digital marketing that would be able to provide you with more detail on how you can increase your following.
Sponsorship and Charitable Donation
There are many tried and tested ways of making a name for yourself in terms of giving back, especially on a local level. Two ways to show your local community you care include sponsoring the football team or giving a donation to a local charity. With everything that’s happened over the last couple of years, people may have lost sight of the fact that these elder school methods of garnering attention are still relevant. Doing a good deed not only shows that you care about your local community by financially investing in their success, but you never know who is going to show up to these types of events or see the press coverage.
Most local newspapers are still trending and they engage with a completely different audience to the one that you’re advertising to online through social media campaigns. Giving back to a local charity or sponsoring a sports team also gives you an opportunity to highlight the areas you particularly care about as the owner of a business. If you are particularly interested in innovative technologies, for example, sponsoring a schools’ science competition will mean that not only are you invested in upcoming technology but doing so also gives you an insight into some of the talents that will be entering the workforce in the future. Who knows – you may just find the next local genius who will make a great addition to your team when he/she graduates?
