Big multinationals and established companies are able to stay ahead of their competitors, because they have the backing of funds to spend on marketing. The kind of money that they spend on advertisements and marketing can overwhelm and discourage small businesses.

How can small businesses possibly compete with big companies having unlimited resources and funds at their disposal?

In this post, we shall offer some valuable tips that can help small companies in creating successful marketing campaigns, without having to outspend their bigger competitors. We have also compiled a few advices from experienced marketers who have track records of successfully competing with bigger companies.

FaceBook Ads:

If you play it right, FaceBook ads have the potentials of taking your business message across millions of people. With more than billion active visitors, this massive platform can help in attracting a lot of target audiences, and engaging with them.

Most of the small and big businesses already have their presence on FaceBook. In addition to organic promotions, FaceBook also presents direct advertising opportunities to their users. The ads are presented before the relevant users and groups in order to increase the click-through rates and likes.

As a small business, it is important for you to first define your niche market and target customers, before running your FaceBook ad campaigns. Once you specify your target, you will need to focus your campaigns towards reaching out to those people in particular. Most of the businesses which use FaceBook ads have seen significant results in terms of increased ROI.

“We do a lot of organic SEO and keep posting regular contents on various authority sites. Even though we get good results, the progress was not as fast we expected. Then we tried paid FaceBook ads on a small scale to test the waters. We saw a remarkable difference in just 2 weeks, and our website traffic jumped up. I recommend small businesses to use both free marketing and paid ads on FaceBook to drive in targeted traffic to their web pages.” CEO - Summerlin homes.

Showcase your happy customers

Happy customers of your business can help others in making the buying decision. Many of them might be willing to tell others about how your company has helped them in their lives. You will need to encourage your happy customers to speak good things about your business.

It will help others in making up their mind about buying your products or services. Regular interaction with your existing customers on social media networks and emails can help in creating influencers among them. You can offer incentives, commissions, or discounts to make it worth their while.

Local search optimization:

Typically people tend to look up the search engines for businesses and solution providers in their locality. Therefore it is very important for you to target the local keywords in your internet marketing campaigns like guest posting, pay-per-click, social media ads, etc.

People are more confident about buying when the provider is from their locality. It is mostly because they are apprehensive about getting timely after-sales services from companies from distant locations. Therefore, local search optimization should be one of the focus areas in your marketing campaigns.

Additionally, you will also need to optimize your website contents with local keywords to increase your online presence in target locations. Local optimization is especially important for those small businesses that rely specifically on certain locations for selling their products or services.

“Onsite local search optimization has helped us get more business on our website, since we focus on selling Sikkim Tour Packages to people from different cities across India. We created separate pages for most of the top cities with useful information about Sikkim. Additionally, we provided information about how to reach Sikkim from those cities. Not only has it helped our website in getting better rankings on local keywords, we are also getting high volumes of targeted traffic.” CEO - Esikkim Tourism

Audio-Visual appeal:

We are living in the age where people love to share images in videos. Social media contents can be really engaging, because people tend to discuss in their groups about the images and videos they like. You could hire professional photographers or videographers to create interesting visual continents that people will want to share it with others.

You will have come across many impact videos and images that have rapidly gone viral. You too can use visual elements to showcase your brand and gain remarkable exposure for your small businesses. You will need to research and find the best apps that are available for sharing your audiovisual contents.

Use multiple channels for leveraging engagement opportunities:

Internet presents us with multiple free channels that can be used for reaching out to the prospective customers, and also to keep engaging with existing customers. You will need to use multiple channels for internet marketing like guest blogging, social media marketing, email marketing, and others. That will increase your chances of developing qualified lead lists, and then converting them as your customers.

It is important to measure and analyze the results from each of these channels. It will help you in understanding which ones are yielding the best results, and the ones that are not. Based on the results, you can make strategies for your next marketing campaigns. It is recommended to use the free channels in combination with paid methods like pay-per-click and FaceBook ads.

As you can see that there are many digital marketing methodologies that you can adopt for marketing your business, and also for long-term branding. The ideas mentioned above are affordable, and are significantly cheaper than TV and newspaper ads.

“Digital marketing methods like guest posting will have a longer effect on your audience, because the published contents will keep marketing your businesses till the pages are live. You can expect increased ROI without spending too much.” Andrew Dominik - Quality Guest Post

Important metrics to monitor and analyze:

All your marketing campaigns should be measurable, so that you can objectively gauge their effectiveness. Not only will it help in calculating the ROI, it will also show you various areas for improving the process.

For email marketing, you will need proper measurement metrics to understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. Some of the important measurement metrics are bounce rate, click-through or response rate, conversion rate, profits per conversion, etc.

For paid marketing campaigns, you will need to keep track of cost per click, response rate or click-through rate, sales conversion rate, and also the cost per-conversion.

For organic digital marketing campaigns like guest posts, social media posts, and article submissions, you will need to measure metrics like page visits, active engagements and comments, social shares, likes, click-through or response rate, conversion rate, profits per conversion, etc.

You can further customize the above mentioned measurement metrics to suit your campaigns. You can use tools like Google Analytics for measuring the statistics of your online marketing campaigns.

Follow-ups and Sales Conversion:

Even though your marketing campaigns are successful, and you are able to draw good volume of targeted traffic, you will still have to make the visitors take the action that you desire. Huge volume of website traffic will not serve your purpose, unless you are successful in converting the visitors as your customers.

Sales conversions can be done with different digital assets like lead forms, landing pages, and Calls-To-Action. CTA refers to urging the visitors to take some kind of action like, agreeing to receive your newsletter, liking your FaceBook page, trying out your trial offer, or even purchasing your product or service.

Whenever people click on backlinks of your marketing campaigns like guest posts and pay-per-click ads, they will reach your landing pages. You will need to create strong contents and use impacting images on landing pages, so that your visitors will take the desirable action. You can also use videos on your landing pages to help them in making the buying decisions.

A big percentage of people visiting your landing pages might not necessarily make the purchase on their first visit. However, they might subscribe to your newsletters for receiving further communication from your company.

You will need to have proper follow-up strategies to keep in touch with those prospective customers, and keep them engaged for an extended period. It will eventually help them in deciding to become your customers.

You will need to be consistent in your follow-ups, but make sure that you do not cross the line and start annoying your leads. That could compel them to mark you as spam, and block you from sending them any further communication. Make sure that you maintain a proper balance to keep them engaged in order to increase the chances of sales conversion.

“The key to success of your online marketing campaigns is consistency. Digital marketing and branding is not going to be a one time task. Even if you manage to get to the top of rankings for your keywords, you will need to keep working harder to stay there. Most of the successful online marketing campaigns are results of focus and sustained efforts.” - CEO Lovesita .