Building an online presence is more than just activating a website.  With the popularity of template websites enabled through WordPress (originally intended for frequent bloggers), or DIY website development on platforms such as WIX, the volume of businesses self-managing their online presence exploded.  Along with that there was created a vast wasteland of online content receiving nothing more than the occasional click, often brought upon by a Google search that happened to contain a lucky phrase that matched something on the website.

The fastest and easiest way to bring customers to your online URL is pay-per-click advertisements on Google and other online platforms, including those focusing on social media content such as Facebook (and all the rest).  Without a PPC budget, however, businesses must focus on organic search rankings through an SEO strategy.  Companies which outsource this work find that often times they get what they pay for.  Red Hat SEO techniques – ones which try to cheat the system – frequently produce good short-term positive results, but are eventually red-flagged by the search engine algorithm, and businesses can spend thousands of dollars and many months to restore their credibility in the sight of the search engines.

While an effective SEO campaign takes quite a bit of time or money (or both), low-budget businesses can see positive action with limited investment through a few approaches.

Emails:  Now considered a bit old-fashioned and for many businesses, would require a very manual process to carry out, direct emails can still draw attention, and may be particularly effective if your business or service offer is high-valued with a small base of customers.  Semi-original emails sent out in small volume (less than 10 at a time) are often not flagged as spam by the receiver’s host service, and therefore can serve as an effective way to highlight your business to the recipient. 

Emails are still a great way to communicate with customers, as an easy format with which to include visuals, white papers and other educational content, links to other online resources, and all of that with a personal touch. 

As always, some level of personalization is required, lest your business be seen as just another email spamming enterprise.  Nonetheless, even if a customer does not read your entire message, or for that matter simply deletes most in-coming messages as part of a routine, a personalized subject header can be sufficient to remind customers of your presence and thereby build additional brand equity.

Here is an example of where multi-channel marketing strategies may be most effective.  If you go to all the trouble to send out a personal email to an individual customer, picking up the phone and dialing direct could have a greater impact.  Emails are most effective when they are a follow-up to some other direct communication.  As a simple reminder that your business exists?  Emails can help if they are not perceived as spam.  There is a grey and sometimes very thin line between the two.

Social media:  Once again, multi-channel marketing is important to give your customer a sense of sophistication in your product or service.  Content Savants devotes a significant portion of its attention on social media content development and publishing strategies. 

There is a lot to discuss in this category, however looking at if from the perspective of driving customers to your website, then that is absolutely essential.  Memes and other postings don’t need to always be clever or colorful.  A simple link with a descriptive comment can be sufficient to drive traffic.  Too frequent posting will bore your followers.  Too occasional, and you miss out on the opportunity to provide diverse and creative content. 

Influencers:  Akin to buying an audience, online influencers (including social media influencers or professional bloggers), can be an effective way to reach a niche audience.  Although this type of promotion is not without a cost, the good news is that as influencing grows in prevalence as its own category of online marketing, the niche focus becomes more intense.  What that means for your business marketing efforts is that there are more likely cost-effective options for social media influencers or bloggers, ones who have already attracted and cultivated the audience you are intending to reach. 

While the influencer market remains a cowboy frontier, the most effective way for you to separate the wheat from the chaff is to search online and find social media influencers and bloggers who are relevant to your business.  Otherwise, if your ad campaign is not necessarily targeted to a specific customer group, an accurate user profile – targeting a type of consumer – will be necessary along with matching that user profile to the profile of followers of your intended influencer.  As with many marketing campaigns, accuracy in profiling is often as much an art as it is a science.