DIY Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

It’s safe to say that entrepreneurs have naturally adventurous, even fearless spirits. Launching a business, after all, certainly isn’t for the timid.

Sound familiar? Then, you may be thrilled to know that your dauntless, can-do attitude can easily be applied to one of the most vital components of a small business’s success: building brand awareness and converting leads into sales while still remaining on budget.

Luckily, DIY marketing has exploded over the years. Here’s how to work it to your advantage.

Understand your audience and set goals

Your first order of business is familiarizing yourself with your target audience—or, to be specific, the precise group of people who are the most likely to engage in your services or purchase your products. This information is crucial: it shapes how you’ll aim to connect with consumers and inform your marketing tactics.

Gaining a solid grasp of your target audience goes beyond basic demographics like age, gender, income, location, and lifestyle. Psychographics (or your ideal customer’s values and belief systems), online behavior, and purchase intention are also factors.

Fortunately, several inexpensive and even complimentary tools can help you obtain a clear-eyed view of your target audience, including:

• Google Customer Match
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• SEMrush
• SpyFu
• Voice of Customer
  

Once that’s been established, your overall and specific marketing goals should be addressed to answer questions such as:

• Do you want to expand your email list?
• Improve your SEO?
• Drive more traffic to your website?
  

Determining exactly what you hope to accomplish can help you forge (another) path forward.

Which may go something like this…

Leverage social media

Even a cursory glance at the statistics reveals the importance of capitalizing on social media’s breadth, size, and influence:

• More than half of consumers turn to social media to learn about new brands and products
• 68% of consumers follow their favorite brands on social to stay in the know about new products
• People spend up to almost 2.5 hours per day on different social platforms
• As a whole, social sites see a massive 4.8 billion users daily
  

In other words, overlooking social media as part of your DIY marketing strategy may keep you from reaching your potential.

Besides, free and cost-effective marketing ideas extend to social media. You can run a contest or giveaway on Facebook to introduce a new product.

Or maybe you’re an industry leader who can exploit the popularity of AMA (Ask Me Anything). Perhaps you might partner with an influencer on Instagram to expand brand awareness.

Our advice? Get to know a free social media management tool like Mailchimp or Hootsuite on an intimate level. Aim to actively engage with your target customer base across the most pertinent social channels.

Adopt content marketing with interactive PDFs

Content marketing on a budget doesn’t mean you have to compromise on quality.

This may seem like a case of “easier said than done” until you acquaint yourself with interactive PDFs or Portable Document Formats that are enlivened with:

• Links
• Audio
• Videos
• High-resolution images
• Animated gifs
• Clickable buttons
  

Utilizing these elements gives your audience a more immersive and memorable experience as they digest your content, whether it’s an upcoming promotion or news about your business.

But how do interactive PDFs function in a DIY marketing plan?

Once your PDF has been converted into an HTML document (or link), you can place it nearly anywhere you’d like—in a relevant blog post, on a landing page, in a social media post, or in a marketing email. In doing so, users can be taken to a more expansive file that may include everything from infographics to videos. Ultimately, this may deepen your audience’s experience with your business and make a lasting impression.

So, how do you put interactive PDFs to best use?

• Create compelling copy: “Compelling copy” may be subjective but involves captivating, persuasive writing that reflects your brand’s voice and speaks the language of your target audience. In an interactive PDF, copy can be paired with vibrant images, videos, and gifs to appeal to a broader range of preferences.
• Optimize your content: Interactive PDFs (and PDFs, period) can promote web traffic much in the same way as blog posts and website pages. The key is to optimize your content with SEO (search engine optimization). This entails using a title and meta description, attaching headings, using hyperlinks, and adding alt text for images, icons, and other non-text elements.
  

Interested but don’t know where to begin? Consider an interactive PDF template to jumpstart your process.

Simplify email marketing

Forget what you may have heard: email marketing is alive and well. In fact, marketing emails have a 46-50% open rate and are one of the leading ways to connect with your consumers on a personal level.

Additionally, email marketing strategies abound—such as sending a customer a promotional code on their birthday—but it’s important to first build your email list by:

• Creating “opt-in” pop-up forms on your blog posts, website, and interactive PDFs
• Crafting powerful CTAs (calls to action) that encourage users to share their email address
• Offering gated content, discounts, and more in exchange for email addresses
  

Do you already have a healthy list but need some assistance? Sites like Hubspot and Mailchimp offer a variety of newsletter and promotional email templates at little or no cost.

Prioritize customer engagement—and shoot for loyalty

The importance of engaging with your customers cannot be overstated, particularly in a marketplace that’s positively saturated with both large and small businesses. Sure, this requires strategies like participating in dialogues across all channels, rewarding user-generated content, and creating loyalty programs that will incentivize word-of-mouth marketing and repeat business.

But it also calls for providing your audience with content that keeps them engrossed—and gets them talking.

Interactive PDFs are one of the golden tickets to delivering just this sort of content. Dive into how they might level up your DIY marketing strategy by starting your free trial with FLIPpages, an all-in-one platform that helps fearless leaders like you take content from ho-hum to striking.