REDUCING BUSINESS COST THROUGH DIGITAL MARKETING.

Digital Marketing is a phenomenal aspect of marketing that has come to stay. It has come to stay because the internet and online platforms upon which digital marketing thrives has proven to be the driving wheel upon which the future businesses and economy of the world would be riding on. And so every company and business owner should be aware of how difficult it will be to successfully capture a good percentage of their share of the market without embarking on any form of digital marketing.

 In pursuing digital marketing as a way to catch up with the trends and also catch up a reasonable share of the market, individuals and organizations must exercise care and caution so as not to waste so much money in the pursuit of digital marketing. It is the considered opinion of this article that we can actually cut cost using digital marketing and still attain our marketing objectives including capturing a good portion of the market share. Some of the digital marketing strategies that can be employed to cut cost include:

1. Link  BUILDING:  This is a strategy whereby you build links that search engines consider relevant to the key words that you want to rank for and thereby bringing more traffic to your website. For you to have a quality link building strategy , you need some level of consistency, dedication and planning.Through link building you can connect very authoritative sites to your page and they can recommend your site, and that can lift you to a higher level of acceptance by others.

 Link building is not a very expensive venture. It can be accomplished by doing  the following things;

• Being Honest
• Follow Up
• Write a Guest Post
• Social Media Links

2. GENERATING LEADS ; This is one of the non expensive activities involved in digital marketing. You don’t need any big budget when it comes to generating leads , generating and converting them to buyers or customers is a very crucial venture in digital marketing. While endeavouring to generate leads , you must keep in mind the following :

i) Know your target customers : your digital marketing campaign will go wrong if you do not have any target customer in mind while designing your campaign. Knowing your target customers will help you reduce unnecessary expenditure, which will boost your return on investment (RIO).

ii) Have a Sales Funnel Strategy: you can plan the reaching of your customers by using the sales funnel building strategy. You can make contents that will attract the leads and customers. You can employ blog posts, email messages, social media posts etc, at the different levels of the funnel.

iii) Use Of Influencers:  The popular people in the society, those who have excelled and being look up to by other members of the society are the one regarded as influencers. One of the discoveries of digital marketing is that connecting this set of people can enhance the attraction of customers  attention  to products. These people already have large followings, so connecting them could be an easy means of connecting their followers. You can connect them by:

Knowing those  who are popular in your niche

Try and provide value to them

iv) Social Media Marketing: One of the digital marketing platforms that can operate at a very low budget is social media marketing (SMM). Connecting and interacting with others via the social media does not cost much and it can link one to large following and building relationships so easily and within a short period. Here are some of the ways in which we can exploit the opportunities embedded in social media marketing:

• Find out the best platform for your brand. For instance if your brand is fashion, pinterest , instagram, and facebook will be best for your brand rather than linked in and twitter.

• Interact Constantly With Followers : There is a huge volume of traffic in many of the social media platforms. As at 19^th march 2021 according to data from internetlivestat.com there are over 2.7 billion active face book users, over 3.7 million active twitter users. At a very low cost  you can engage and interact with people within these huge traffic that exist in the social media.
• Maintain Consistency: In the use of social media, one thing we must not forget is that consistent posts matters a lot if you must be in touch with your target audience. You may even employ certain tools like Hoot Suite or Buffer for the purpose of automation to ensure our posts are consistent and fresh daily.
• v) Use Of Email List: Email marketing is another platform of digital marketing that can allow low budgets and saving of cost. For you to engage in email marketing, you need to grow your email list. To grow your email list, you need to take the following steps:  
•  Offer Incentives: You need to offer something to people if they must leave their email with you. This could be discount, free coupon or any other incentive.

• Landing Page: This is a page where people can drop their email addresses. On this page there should be attractive, persuasive and convincing titles or headings, testimonies, and  benefits of dropping their email list.

 Closing Word: Digital marketing can be effectively carried out and outstanding results will be achieved with very minimal cost.  The business owner or the company embarking on the campaign only needs to carefully follow the strategies outlined in this piece, and they can be sure that they can reach their target audience, obtain reasonable conversions and patronage at a very low budget.