5 Inexpensive Marketing Strategies To Attract and Engage Customers
This is guest post — Sergi Trivino is a passionate entrepreneur dedicated to helping professionals achieve a better lifestyle. His free course teaches you impactful strategies to gain more time, wealth and freedom in your business. Entrepreneur by nature, he is right now on a journey to meet the top achievers of the world while putting the lessons learned on improving his new project, Lifestyle Mission.
Welcome Sergi…
Inexpensive Marketing Strategies
If you go to a marketing agency, the first thing they will ask you is your budget.
There are still a lot of people who think that the only viable way to attract customers is to put a substantial amount of money on the table upfront. They don’t believe that inexpensive and even free strategies to attract and engage customers exist, and are often much more effective than paid alternatives.
I want to share with you 5 inexpensive customer generation strategies that are being used by successful brands right now. I’m also adding a small work plan you can follow immediately to get your feet wet and find out what works best for your business.
Guest Blogging
If done well, guest blogging can be the main pillar of your traffic and customer generation plan.
It will give you reputation, authority, targeted traffic, subscribers, and finally customers who keep the cash flowing to your business. But as I said, you will only achieve all of this if you do it the right way. Otherwise, it can become a waste of time and a new source of frustration in your life.
Based on what I have learned from companies that have achieved spectacular numbers of customers through guest blogging, such as Buffer, this is the working plan I would follow:
- Define your ideal customers clearly. Preferably, put it in written form by creating personas so you can take them into account with every piece of content you craft.
- If you haven’t started a blog, start one right now.
- Write quality content! And make it really valuable to your target customers. You should aim to ease at least one pain for your readers with every post you write.
- Once you have published a few posts on your own blog that you can show as samples, research blogs that talk about topics attractive to your target customers. It’s really important that you separate blogs by level of authority and popularity.
Some metrics you can use are the Alexa Rank (the lower the better), Page Rank (the higher the better) and Twitter Followers (the higher the better).
If you don’t have any guest blogging experience, start with blogs with an Alexa Rank of around 100,000 that are generating some engagement in social media. Avoid dead or abandoned blogs. You should be able to start one step higher than that if you follow these steps.
- Once you have decided which blog you want to post on, verify that it allows guest posts, read its guidelines and write a message pitching a couple of topics that could be interesting for their audience. It’s important that you do the homework upfront and check the main topics they are writing about, so you can offer content that’s really tasty to them.
- Be polite, listen and don’t be afraid to be rejected.
- If your posts aren’t accepted, ask why so you can learn from it and improve. This will get you one step closer to being accepted the next time.
- Once accepted, do all that you can to write a post that goes above and beyond all expectations.
- Don’t forget to add a link to your site inside the post! Ensure that readers will get additional value by visiting your page and that it’s related to the content of the post.
Here is an example of adding links to your websites in a guest post in an appealing and valuable way:
After the post has been published, do all that you can to spread it. Share it on social media, send it to your email contacts, subscribe it to syndication networks like Reddit and reply to every comment you receive. This will make the blog owner happy and will open the door to future collaborations.
Search Engine Optimization
I won’t exert myself by describing advanced SEO strategies in detail, because there is a lot of technical stuff written out there, the majority of it completely useless and even harmful for your business.
I will keep it simple and natural, so your search engine rankings improve automatically as you focus on the other strategies I mention, which will give you faster and safer results without costing a fortune.
First, you should research which keywords are most appropriate to target. If you go for the ones that are getting more searches or that sound better, SEO simply won’t produce any positive result for you.
Instead, go for keywords with low competition and a decent monthly number of searches, so you avoid having to fight with established websites. At the same time, you will be responding to more specific questions from your target customers, and they will be thankful to find you. (You can do this research for free with the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool.)
Once you know the keywords, start deliberately including them in your blog posts, website pages and any other content you publish online. As you go up the ladder of guest blogging and other actions that increase your online authority, you will notice that Google starts benefitting any content you post and you start appearing higher in searches using those keywords.
Local Seminars and Events
This strategy is really underestimated nowadays, and is completely ignored by businesses that could be getting impressive results from it.
Based on my experience, and that of important influencers who attend events with the sole purpose of getting customers (even when they are already making millions with their products), I can tell you that this is one of the most powerful ways to generate immediate customers.
The most important thing when deciding which seminar or event you should attend is knowing that you can offer something of immediate value for the attendees.
For instance, when I was in web design, I used to get two or three customers from every free seminar for new entrepreneurs I attended. This is because aspiring entrepreneurs normally need a website for promoting their products or services.
Best of all, you don’t have to push or ask to attract them, all you need is to have the solution to their current problem in your hands.
Showing up solves a lot of the problems a website has in achieving proper trust, and it’s a great shortcut to gaining loyal leads and customers immediately. If you are struggling to generate customer engagement and loyalty, you should give it a try right now.
Q&A Sites
You can become an authority by offering high-quality replies to questions in your industry.
The key is to go above and beyond in every reply. Remember, the replies you post will stay online for a long time and can end up becoming a helpful resource for hundreds or thousands of potential customers.
Writing a good reply may take some time, but you should be able to make the time available to create at least 5 to 10 each week. A good idea is to schedule the moment in the week when you will write them and take their completion seriously, as the solid customer generation action they are.
If you have an assistant, you can save time by having the assistant select the best questions for you to reply to. Then you can even record the replies on audio in bulk, and pass them on to be transcribed and put in clean written format that can be posted directly by your assistant.
The most recommended Q&A site for increasing your reputation and brand awareness is Quora.
Almost all online influencers I know recommend Quora as a powerful tool that should be used by every business.
Keep your replies useful and valuable and you will soon start reaping the rewards.
Social Media
You may have heard that free social media marketing doesn’t work, but that’s not true. It just depends on the approach you use. Next to face-to-face meetings, social media is one of the most natural ways to engage with people. So if you try unnatural marketing strategies with it, people will just ignore you or hate you.
The key is to remember at all times that you are dealing with people, and you have to give people what they want before expecting a reaction. That’s how humans work.
The number of social networks available can be overwhelming, and depending in your niche, some will work better and some will not work at all. That’s why I recommend you start focusing on the three below, and add others such as Pinterest or Youtube depending on the product you offer.
I have defined a small work plan for each so you can learn about some of the actions that produce faster results, and determine which works better for you.
- Follow influencers and followers of influencers daily to build a follower base that resonates with your products. Try using tools such as Followerwonk or AllTop for recognizing the top influencers in your industry.
- Schedule 3 to 5 tweets daily. You can do this with tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite.
- What will produce real results is not the tweets, but the engagement that you can create on a one-to-one basis by making replies and mentions. Any reply you make is a potential visitor to your website. More so if you reply to high-traffic tweets and mention accounts with tons of followers that are a fit for your business.
- Remember to be original, faithful to your values and helpful. For this channel to work, you will have to jab for some time before you can land a right hook. That means you have to keep giving before you can expect amazing results.
Building a follower base large enough to produce revenue by simply tweeting offers takes time. Is it worth the effort? You can see how big and small companies are making it and the results they achieve once there, so you can judge if you want to achieve the same.
This should be your main focus if you are a B2B company. Here are some proven actions to build your LinkedIn influence:
- Create a company page.
- Share your content on it.
- Use your personal account to connect with industry influencers, generate synergies, and be open to collaboration opportunities that may arise.
- Join groups in your industry and post some useful comments on them. You can also post links to your posts and guest posts to drive targeted traffic to them.
- Create a group related to the products and services your company offers. Use a name that’s both unique and original, and can be found when searching with the LinkedIn search bar for something related. (Keyword optimization also works here for appearing higher in the results)
As always, try to come up with a name that is actually being searched. If you use very technical or uncommon words, no one will find your group through natural search.
- The disadvantage of Facebook compared to Twitter and LinkedIn is that it doesn’t allow you to engage with people as easily. You can’t mass follow accounts for getting likes, so you have to use alternative ways to build your following.
- The fastest way to build the number of likes is to pay for it. You create advertising that is shown to people with common interests and entice them to like your page.
I don’t recommend you do this, because you are unlikely to recover the investment. If you expect to send offers for your products once you have a decent number of people liking your page, and get a good conversion rate, you must be warned that many of your fans will never see the content you post. This is because Facebook’s algorithm benefits paid posts over free posts.
One way you can get a chance to show up in people’s newsfeeds is by generating lots of likes and comments in your posts.
Being patient and building your number of likes in natural ways is a secure, strong path to getting a warm following.
You can redirect users from your other social networks, websites and by word of mouth. Offer them an incentive in exchange for liking you and you will grow faster.
- After you have enough likes, you can accumulate more by using your fans to propagate your page among their contacts.
Keep posting top-notch content frequently and you will create a nice multiplying effect.
Conclusion
You don’t need to spend a fortune to attract customers to your business. There are free actions you can take that give better results than paid alternatives. If done with care, they will generate a deeper level of engagement, trust, and loyalty in your potential customers, which is what every business should strive to achieve today.
Did I miss anything? I’d love to hear your thoughts on inexpensive strategies to attract customers in the comments.
About Sergi Trivino
Sergi Trivino is a passionate entrepreneur dedicated to helping professionals achieve a better lifestyle. His free course teaches you impactful strategies to gain more time, wealth and freedom in your business.
Entrepreneur by nature, he is right now on a journey to meet the top achievers of the world while putting the lessons learned on improving his new project, Lifestyle Mission. You can reach Sergi via Twitter at @trivigold.