Dear Tammy: You've written a lot about free marketing opportunities, such as social media, in order to get the proper exposure for my business. I'm all about saving money, but are there some marketing opportunities that are worth paying for?
Tammy: Yes, sometimes you do need to invest in your business in order to make money. These are investments that immediately come to mind:
Email
You need to be able to email your customers, so investing in a good email marketing company is a great way to put your name right in front of your clientele on a regular basis.
Many people use programs such as Constant Contact or MailChimp that cost a minimal amount of money-the more emails you have the more the monthly charges, but it still is pretty affordable.
SEO
If Search Engine Optimization is a foreign language to you, you should invest in someone who could help you to create a successful SEO campaign that will get traffic to your website.
This is important because you want the right words to be used on your website that will attract the right customers. Those customers find your website, go to it and turn into sales. It's that easy, but not everyone understands this.
Invest in some research about SEO and then ask established businesses who they have used. Be careful because there are a lot of unscrupulous SEO businesses out there so you want to make sure you hire one that's legit.
Reach
Finally, yes, social media is free, but it's really worthless if you aren't doing it regularly (or right). You have a brand that you're trying to market, and you want to make sure you reach the right target audience.
There are social media marketing experts that know how to do that for you. They will show you how to brand your posts on Twitter and Facebook, for example, and make sure they aren't too much of an advertisement. These must be engaging with your followers.
It takes skill to know how to do that, but if this isn't your forte, it's best to invest in someone else who knows what they are doing.
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