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Marketing is an essential aspect of a business. It’s what will drive customers or clients to your business.
To develop an effective marketing plan, you need to develop a strategy, though coming up with one requires funds. But what if you don’t have enough funds to implement your media strategy? Read on to check out some tips for launching a media strategy with a small budget.
1. Adopt The Right Tools
You’ll need several tools to apply a media strategy. These tools aim to give your brand recognition, helping you realize your objectives, drive traffic, and attract customers.
One marketing tool is social media. You can use a social media management tool to monitor social engagement and schedule posts. On social media platforms, customers make inquiries, compliment your products or services, or offer constructive criticism. A social media management tool will allow you to respond to multiple messages, be it their questions or feedback.
Aside from tracking social engagement, you can create a social editorial calendar with a social media management tool. Sending a lot of posts will lead to positive results, but there should be a balance between regular posts and meaningful social media content. That’s where social media management tools will come in handy: They give you time to plan your posting strategy, as well as your content.
Another reliable approach is using digital activation. What is digital activation? It involves greenlighting your marketing campaign after finalizing your plans. Not only is digital activation a cost-effective strategy but also a powerful one in connecting with a wider audience. One example of digital activation is paid social, which is advertising content on social media platforms to target specific customers.
2. Know Your Goals
Your goals should always be the driving force of any strategy you want to execute, in this case, your media strategy. Therefore, you must identify your goals.
What are you aiming to achieve from implementing the strategy? What aspect of your brand are you focusing on? For instance, you could focus on increasing brand awareness or introducing a new product to the market. As you consider your goals, be as specific as you can to gain favourable results.
3. Understand Your Target Audience
You need to keep your target audience in mind while planning your media strategy. With the information you gather about your audience, you’ll be able to devise a strategy that’s tailored to them. For example, if you’re selling clothes, a social media post will appeal to your target audience who may be young women aged between 20 and 35.
To start identifying your audience, take a look at your current customer base. Figure out who usually buys your products or avails of your services. How old are they? Where are they based? What are they interested in? You can interview them or send customer surveys.
Understanding your target audience will help you develop strategies that will aid in achieving your goals. After all, you wouldn’t want to waste your budget on strategies that might not work.
4. Create A List Of Priorities
A list of priorities is essential since a media strategy has several aspects to it that lead to its success. Some of these aspects include creating a theme for the campaign, designing ads, marketing the product, creating free samples, and so on.
These aspects play an important role in your strategy, though, to varying degrees. Some are compulsory, while others you can put off, such as free samples. Based on your to-do list you have, arrange them in order of priority, starting with the compulsory ones and ending with the least important ones.
Using this list as your guide, allocate your budget appropriately, with more funds for the compulsory ones and less for the least important ones. With proper distribution of your budget, you’ll be able to take care of crucial aspects of your media strategy even if your budget runs low midway.
5. Launch In Phases
Launching a strategy can be time-consuming and costly. With a small budget, it becomes more challenging. So, consider launching in phases. Divide your strategy into parts based on its stages of execution.
Under phase one, you can have theme creation, graphic designing, ad development, and everything marketing. These are the aspects that will make customers interested in your products or services.
But suppose you’re going to introduce a product. In that case, your first phase should cover manufacturing a considerable amount of new goods, followed by marketing.
Launching your product in phases will allow you to obtain enough funds for each phase. You can use 90% of your small budget in phase one. You’ll have time to acquire a sufficient budget, plus utilise the remaining 10%, for the next phase.
Conclusion
You need a budget to run an effective marketing campaign. However, having a small budget doesn’t mean you won’t be able to achieve your goals. You’ll have a successful launch by following these tips, even with a limited budget.
You may also like: How to Develop a Marketing Strategy for Your Startup
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