Adam Lee
10 June 2020
There are multiple ways to accurately target an audience and market to it.
Here are some of the free and paid ways you can target an audience and market to them.
Email marketing
Once there are people coming to your sites, you could do something really useful with it.
How? By collecting the email ids of people who visit the site.
You can do this for free with Mailchimp that offers a free account where you can collect up to 2000 different subscribers.
The only word to heed?
Don’t be too promotional. Offer useful stuff to your subscribers.
Keep regular mailings but don’t overly promote or send too many emails. They will hit the unsubscribe button that you won’t have a list any longer.
Video marketing
Video has had a big jump in the past several years and everybody and their grandmothers are involved in video marketing today.
You too can get started and create some engaging videos.
The first thing you can do is create a YouTube account. Now don’t see all those high-end videos and start beating yourselves down. A simple video is often enough. That’s shareable.
You can also post it to social media channels as well.
Post content to Facebook
Social media is a great and big channel to promote content. It’s also 100% free to use.
You need not sign up on every platform there is. Because there are hundreds. Instead focus on one or two main channels.
Facebook is one. Because the demographics give you a wide berth. The algorithm makes it difficult to organically reach your audience. But posting regular updates and being engaging means there’s tons of stuff you can do.
Post updates every now and then and be interesting. If you don’t have the time to handle this, you can hire a virtual assistant to handle social media promotion for your business.
Build out a professional network on LinkedIn
You need not be a b2b company to create a strong presence on LinkedIn.
It’s a great place for businesses of all sizes and shapes.
Engage and create good lasting relationships and you’re set.
Encourage UGC from customers
User generated content refers to any content that’s created for free by followers of your brand.
The selfie with your product or pictures of your product are all UGC content.
This is a direct result of people loving your products and brand.
UGC that occurs naturally is very slow. Instead encourage and incentivise UGC with the help of gift cards, thank you letters and by featuring customers on your social media feed.
Run social media giveaways
Social media giveaways increase engagement and improve your chances of getting new followers.
It’s a great way of showing some gratitude towards your customers. It’s also one way to reach out to new customers.
Social media giveaways aren’t going to be a cost free method to generate these new followers. That said it doesn’t cost a ton either. If you can’t do it on your own hire social media managers.
Build relationships
Once you see the kind of social media contests and posts that are popular go further to leverage these relationships with new followers to extend your reach.
More reach automatically translates to a greater degree of success.
Ask your existing followers to spread the word about your social media accounts and you get a lot more followers and people getting behind your content.
Do SEO for social media
You can also do SEO for free for social media and get people to engage more:
Here are the steps to follow
Step 1: Do a keyword research. A tool like Adwords keyword planner is one free tool to find out popular keywords around your business. You can also use semi-free tools like UberSuggest. They’re equally good.
Step 2: Add keywords to social media captions
Step 3: Add keywords to social media descriptions
Step 4: Add keywords to file names that you are uploading and so on.
Use hashtagged keywords as well. Don’t over optimize with too many keywords. Add a minimum number of keywords and make it readable to a human.
These are some of the free ways in which you can market your site and online business for free.
You might think why social media.
Social media is a great platform. The biggest names are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. All of these sites can be used to promote your business online. To make it an effective strategy adopt the best possible techniques to improve brand visibility.
Your goal is to improve the company’s branding and turn it into a communication platform to connect with customers and potential customers.
It’s a medium that was unthinkable 8 years ago. We have a novel manner of connecting with customers beyond the normal route of email or other forms of paid advertising. Take advantage. Content and the design of the social media posts matter above all.
About the Author
George blogs at EmailAnalytics a powerful tool to monitor email performance
