The process of starting a business is a challenging one, especially if you want to do it on a shoestring budget. One of the many questions you will have to answer is: “How am I going to market my business?”

You may be under the impression that once you have gotten your business off the ground, your marketing efforts will take care of themselves, but this is far from true. To ensure you get the most out of your marketing dollars, you will need to put a plan in place. This plan will cover the following:

Marketing Mix (The Way You’ll Mix Marketing Concepts To Reach Potential Customers)

Once you’ve established your business, you have to figure out how to get the word out there about your services. While there are a variety of ways to market your business, there is only one way to reach a target audience and that is through a combination of marketing methods.

You’ll want to find the sweet spot where you can reach the perfect blend of untapped audiences, all while having fun with your marketing. To get started, we’ve compiled a list of 20 marketing ideas, which you can mix and match to fit your needs.

1. Blogging

Blogging is one of the simplest and most convenient ways to market your business. You can have a blog for free, which you can use to post product reviews, helpful hacks, and other content that may be relevant to your target audience. Just remember that this is an easy way to get traffic, but it doesn’t guarantee sales.

You can start a blog by registering with a free platform, like WordPress, which offers both free and premium themes and plugins that you can use to build your blog. If you don’t have a lot of experience writing, then start a blog using a free platform like Squarespace or HubSpot and take it easy. Don’t worry about making it fancy right away, as you can always improve on your blogs’ design as you go along.

Blogging is a tried and tested way to engage with audiences and let them know that your business exists. If you want to learn more, here are 10 blogging tips to help you get started.

2. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media is a goldmine for marketers. Not only does it provide you with an audience, but you can engage with them in a way that is relevant to your product or service. You can use social media to:

• Raise brand awareness
• Generate leads
• Build credibility
• Get people talking about you
• Establish yourself as an expert
• And much more

To get started with SMM, simply find the relevant platforms for your target audience (i.e. Facebook for businesses selling goods or services to consumers, YouTube for businesses with a service offering, etc.).

Once you’re up and running, you can begin to engage with your target audience through:

• Regular posts
• Instagram stories
• Twitter decks
• And others

Above all else, make sure that you follow the platform’s rules, as they will dictate how your audience engages with you. For example, on Twitter, you cannot advertise or promote your own products or services, but you can share relevant content from business accounts that you follow.

With SMM, you want to make sure that your efforts are bringing in the right results. To figure this out, look to your business’ analytics tool to see what is and isn’t working, and then make necessary adjustments. For instance, if you notice that your YouTube videos aren’t getting very many views, then maybe you should stop making them. Or perhaps, you should try a new marketing channel, where your videos may be more likely to go viral.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a form of marketing that can’t be overlooked. With SEO, you will want to utilize the power of search to drive traffic to your website. To do this, you will want to make sure that your website is set up correctly and that all of its pages are using relevant and quality content. To get started with SEO, use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to easily find the keywords that people are using to find your product or service online. Once you’ve found these keywords, you can use them to enter your website’s URL into the search bar on Google, or other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo.

You also want to make sure that your site’s content is detailed, yet easy to understand. If someone is searching for a specific product and can’t find it easily, you might end up losing out on a sale. However, overly complicated content that is hard to understand will make your site appear less credible to potential customers.

To generate leads and grow your business, you must be using some sort of lead capture strategy. Whether you’re using a standalone tool like GetResponse or are creating lead forms within your WordPress blog, make sure you follow the best practices discussed below.

4. SEO (continued)

Once you have your leads coming in, it’s time to turn them into paying customers. To do this, you will want to make sure that your website is set up correctly and that all of its pages are using relevant and quality content. To start, try using the methods discussed below to improve your site’s SEO.

You can also use free tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your site. With Google Analytics, you can learn a lot about your site’s traffic and how to increase conversions. For example, you can learn which pages are drawing the most traffic and which ones aren’t, and then adjust your content or design to fit the audience.

As you get to know your audience and what they want, you can incorporate this into your content strategy to provide them with quality content that is tailored to their needs. With the right strategic planning, implementing an online marketing plan can be quite effective.