Five Ways to Create an Affordable Marketing Plan

In a rapidly changing world, creating affordable marketing plans increasingly depends on your ability to use the latest consumer trends to generate profitable ROI.

If you can develop the flexibility to quickly adapt your marketing plan to consumer dynamics, your business will become adept at creating affordable yet effective campaigns.

1. Describe your target market

Getting to know your market is essential for effective consumer and customer targeting. Affordable ways to gain insights include analyzing your current data and creating competitor case studies.

Once you have developed a better understanding of the demographic group you need to target, you can define a marketing plan more precisely and potentially save money:

• Eliminate ineffective strategies
• Make fewer mistakes
• Improve ROI through targeted ads and content

As your budget grows, consider looking into more complex ways to analyze data, such as artificial intelligence (AI). Consumer data marketing platform Blueshift found that AI increased customer engagement by 310-720% and revenue by more than 300% compared to campaigns using conventional methods.

Similarly, AI mobile push notifications performed twice as well as email campaigns using the same technology.

2. Use affordable influencers

Using the latest consumer data to refine your marketing strategy is crucial, which is highlighted by recent changes in social media platforms, especially Facebook.

According to data published in 2018, Facebook’s organic search results are seeing their impact diminish. This coincides with an increase in the number of people using the site. Statista reports that Facebook now has more than two billion monthly active users and 1.74 billion mobile users.

At the same time, paid social media is becoming increasingly important on the platform, and the need to spend on paid advertising on a channel like Facebook is a concern if you have a small marketing budget.

However, the changing dynamics of social media algorithms also illustrate the importance of influencers for marketers in 2018 and beyond. Above all, selecting the right influencers can make a huge difference when it comes to marketing costs.

3. Typical Fees of Established Influencers

The highest paid influencers in the world would charge upwards of US$250,000 for an Instagram post, while more standard costs tend to be between $500 and $2,000.

• Instagram: $1,000 for 100,000 followers
• Snapchat: from $500 per 24-hour campaign
• YouTube: $2,000 for 100,000 subscribers

However, if you apply a little creativity and think outside the box, your influencer campaigns can deliver great results on a lower budget.

Someone with “Instagram fame” and high rates isn’t the only solution. In fact, many startups and SMBs struggle financially as they exhaust their marketing budgets by focusing on high-end influencers. Typically, this comes at the expense of building authentic businesses that truly engage with their tribes.

Affordable influencer tips:

• Consider authentic small influencers
• Do you have a potential internal influencer?
• Can you employ an influencer to perform other tasks?
• Influential tech-savvy students are increasingly popular
• Become adept at finding talent in the world of influencers

Remember that you can start small with influencers and monitor your results.

4. Create in-house video marketing

The emergence of new social media marketing channels, such as Instagram TV (IGTV), is also something to consider. One of your biggest marketing questions is how to create affordable and highly engaging video content.

And this is where creating content in-house can offer real hope for those on limited budgets. As revealed when IGTV launched in 2018, the platform is designed to allow Instagram users to watch long-form content for up to 60 minutes.

Luckily, creating video content can be done with technology as simple as a good quality cell phone.

And if you have great creativity (or someone on your team does), creating content for platforms like IGTV can offer a unique way to gain market traction without a big budget.

• IGTV content
• Snapchat
• Classic Instagram posts
• Electronic books
• youtube videos
• Podcasts
• Facebook posts/articles

5. Plan carefully and stick to your budget

Most startups and SMBs will benefit from the combination of free and paid marketing. Naturally, the exact mechanics and available options will largely depend on your budget.

The first step is to define your marketing budget and then try to create a holistic approach in line with the capital available. The key here is to plan carefully and create a spreadsheet and action plan.

If your plan is undefined and lacks integrity, chances are you’ll make more mistakes, overspend, and potentially chase profits by making bad decisions. But if you know exactly what you’re doing (and when to do it), you’ll implement every strategy and task with maximum efficiency.

Use six-month plans to keep scaling

Generally, creating a six-month marketing strategy is a good time to start a campaign and get enough information. However, in today’s online environment, you can also consider running micro-campaigns over much shorter periods of time, to test their potential.

Over the next decade, marketing trends are likely to constantly evolve as new online platforms and technologies shape how businesses can influence people most effectively. Creating affordable marketing plans will likely increasingly depend on using the latest trends to deliver a good return on investment and fuel business growth.

Related: Ignite Sales: A Marketing Secret to Controlling the Buying Process