I do marketing on the side to earn a few extra bucks, since I’m able to pair it with web development services. It’s a great way to make money, and it helps develop desired skills for clients. This becomes a win/win scenario for any of you that are looking for ways to add a horizontal market to your business.
For me, I’ve always had to keep the budgets small; this is okay, because you still have enough of a budget to experiment and deliver results. The big impacts, I’ve found, often come from the unexpected. Scenarios such as when a promoted post is randomly picked up by a news outlet or a coupon code hits the customer base at just the right time.
Two Marketing Strategies that Worked for Me
I can’t say the strategies I’ve used will work for every business. The mix I’ve tried were for e-commerce businesses, single product sites, personal blogs, and service-based shops, like automotive repair businesses. Yet, I do think with enough tweaking you can take these fundamental strategies and make them work for you.
Social Media
I love using social media, especially Facebook, for marketing because the tools are extremely easy to use, and you can target groups of people down to the finest details. This low barrier of entry and laser targeting cuts the costs associated with learning advertising and marketing platforms and wasteful spending on the wrong audience.
The easiest and cheapest way to market on Facebook is with boosted posts.
All that’s needed is the normal routine of sharing, measuring response, and then boosting updates that have engagement. I often boost a post for just $5 which is enough to get it out to the core audience, in small business follower size, which then makes the following update easily accessible to them.
I also like to work alongside a social media marketing agency to pick their brains on what works for their projects and to scale the campaign after I’ve done the groundwork. You can show clients what’s possible with social media marketing and then hand it over to others, which often come with a kick back through an affiliate referral.
B2B and B2C Blogging
One client I work with is in a rather boring industry, but that doesn’t stop me from finding interesting topics to cover on their company blog. The blog is now one of the main sources of lead generation because of the high placement of content in search engines. It also fuels the company social feeds.
The content marketing for businesses is truly inexpensive and effective.
It’s done rather simply, too:
- Talk with employees and keep notes of common issues, praises, and insights.
- Look through email logs for common questions and requests from customers.
- Swipe from the competition and build on their popular posts.
- Monitor social feeds to find trending topics and leverage the community’s attention.
- Create content around what you’d want to know as a customer.
Once you have this information, I’d recommend creating a content schedule so new posts are going up a few times a week. Publish content, share it, report on what works, and then focus on the popular topics.
Other Quick Wins
There may only be two main strategies covered here, but there are many others I use for quick wins. I tend to keep these smaller projects under $100 (many being just $10).
These include:
- Updated business cards to pass around at meetups
- Flyers and printed promotional items to display in stores and at events
- Affiliate or CPA marketing with loyal customers
- Shooting video for YouTube and Facebook feeds
- Email marketing using courses, freebies, or cold-emailing clients or businesses
These are the types of campaigns that can roll out in a day. Combine these with the big projects listed above and you’ll have quite a lot to offer your clients and learn something new.
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