Many small business fear marketing. The thought of having to compete with established businesses in the industry scares them. Marketing doesn’t have to be that scary, as long as you have the commitment and follow the right procedures. Here is a list of tested marketing solutions you might find useful.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a marketing technique where a company pays a commission to an external website for any traffic and sales generated from the referrals originating from that website. As a company that is paying a commission to an affiliate marketer, you need to set favorable rates to attract more website owners. We recommend setting your rates below the gross profit generated by the sales. To attract even more people, you must offer a good payout for every sale you make. Come up with an affiliate marketing budget to get the most out of affiliate marketing at an affordable rate.

Influencers

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where you involve certain influential people to promote your brand. The best thing about influencers is that they allow you to present your brand in front of an audience that is already engaged. An endorsement from a celebrity, for instance, can generate a lot of traffic in your site and bring in more customers in a way you never imagined. The celebrity simply needs to share with his audience about the positive experience her got with your brand. Given that developing a large social presence online requires a lot of effort, time and money, you can use influencers to reach people faster.

Capturing Emails

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to get more leads and conversions. However, you can only succeed if you embrace the best email marketing practices. One of these practices revolves around capturing emails and nurturing leads. These practices have the potential to generate more leads than social media and advertisements combined. In fact, according to marketing research, you can generate up to $44 for every $1 you spend on lead nurturing and email capture. As a small business manager, email is the sure way to get more customers on a budget. For effective results, use action triggers and customer segmentation techniques to create campaigns that provide buyers with the information they need in a timely manner.

Partnerships

Business relationships are very important. So create more. You don’t necessarily need to have a lot of money to reach out to businesses for partnership. You just need to be aggressive and ready to corporate with others. Forming partnerships can be a great way to market your products if you don’t have enough money for advertisements. Form partnerships with companies that deal with complementary products or share the same business ideals. If you deal with mouthwash products, for example, you can form a partnership with a company that manufactures toothbrushes or toothpastes. If you sell clothes, you can partner with Footwear Company. There so many opportunities for cross-promotional marketing in such partnerships.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been there for quite some time and has proved to be an effective marketing strategy for most websites. What SEO optimization does is it makes your website highly visible for search engines, increasing its search ranking in the process. This in turn increases the number of people who visit your site, some of which may convert and buy your products. There are key SEO optimization strategies you need to observe. First, you must create relevant and high quality content. You must then make your website easily navigable for both mobile and desktop users. Use the right keyword combination and avoid keyword stuffing.

Marketing is never an easy thing. But since it determines the success of your business, you have no any other choice but to do it. Use the tips discussed in this post to come up with an effective and affordable marketing strategy for your business.