How to Up Your Marketing Game On a Budget

As a purpose-driven organization that’s making the world better, it’s important to amplify your impact story. If you’ve been around the block, there’s a good chance you’ve already undertaken some sort of marketing effort, whether it’s email newsletters or social media posts.

For many organizations, especially in the ESG space, there’s a chance that marketing efforts may wind up getting deprioritized to help keep different priorities or impact projects on track. 

This might make marketing seem like an expensive “luxury.” However, being tactical and strategic with your efforts can result in effective marketing that doesn’t break the bank. Here’s how to up your marketing game on a budget.

Drive Website Traffic

Whether you want to educate your audience on your important cause, or encourage them to buy your company’s sustainable products from your digital storefront, it’s a good idea to make driving website traffic one of your goals. After all, your website is the digital home of your organization! 

You can tailor your marketing tactics depending on your budget to increase website visitors. One relatively inexpensive way to do this is by regularly producing educational and value-driven blog posts that include necessary search engine optimization keywords to help your Google ranking. 

Similarly, an email newsletter can also be another effective website traffic driver and all-around great marketing tool. There are several free and paid email marketing tools out there that can help you create emails to strategically drive traffic directly to specific pages on your website.

If your target audience is particularly active on social media, running paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn that link to your website can be a way to put your budget to good use and get more eyes on your brand. 
Alternatively, you can also launch paid Google search ads, which is when you bid on keywords to show up at the top of Google search rankings. Just a heads up, though, this tactic can get expensive quickly, so you’ll want to be very strategic in its execution if you choose to do this.

Grow Your Social Media Audience

When it comes to achieving your organization’s impact goals and boosting awareness of your cause, social media can be a powerful tool. In fact, 83% of Canadians use social media, which means it’s likely your target audience is already there. 

In addition, according to GlobalWebIndex, 71% of consumers are more likely to purchase products and services based on social media referrals. 

A good first step is to regularly post well-curated content on your key social media platforms with relevant hashtags. Hootsuite recommends posting at least once per day depending on the platform.

In order to show your audience and prospective followers what your values are, it’s also a good idea to post about the causes that matter to you through educational infographics, reshares of content from other value-aligned organizations, or collaborating with micro influencers in your specific niche. Content resharing in particular is a budget-friendly method of community building online.
If you’ve got a little extra room in your marketing budget, you can introduce paid social media ads into your repertoire designed to increase your followers. For example, to show up on the Explore page of like-minded Instagram users, you could try Instagram Explore ads. Other social media platforms have similar ad types as well.

Convert Prospective Customers

For many organizations, conversion is the ultimate end-goal – literally. Perhaps you want to sell more of your ethically-made products or get more donations for your worthy cause. That’s where marketing efforts towards conversion come in. 

If you sell a tangible product or service, one relatively budget-friendly way to encourage sales is to offer a deal or promotion, or to run a giveaway. You can promote the sale in your email newsletter, on social media, and on your website. Encouraging sharing and tagging in your social media posts is a good way to get more eyes on your promo.

If you have the budget for paid advertising, an excellent form of paid ads for converting customers is retargeting ads. These ads remind customers of an item in their cart or an action they didn’t complete to remind them in order to edge along the conversion. For example, if someone went to your page, learned about your cause, but hadn’t yet donated, a retargeting ad could remind them to do so. 

If this all seems a little overwhelming, it’s fine! The most important thing to remember is that if you’re on a budget, you don’t need to do it all when it comes to marketing. Find out where your audience is, identify your most important business goals, and create strategic content around that.

Marketing agencies are also a great resource. We’re able to help you map out your customer journey, strategically identify and target critical marketing touchpoints in that journey, and build tactical content and ads designed to support your most important business goals.

Choose Sparx for Your Budget-Friendly Marketing Efforts

You’re making the world better and we want to help you do it.

If you’re looking to amplify your world-changing message, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose-driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business, all within a variety of budgets. You can reach us here.