Most large companies and/or brands started with placing online advertising in the attempt to reach potential consumers. In the early years this method used to be effective. But the results have diminished as most competitors have followed the same method. However for small businesses, the cost effective method is through inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, marketers connect prospect leads through materials and experiences where they find useful. Examples of inbound marketing strategies include:

• Search engines
• Topical blogs
• Social media campaigns
• Social media groups
• Viral videos
• Podcast
• Ebooks and bookmarking

With social media, let’s take Facebook as an example. Social marketing campaigns consist of two types. The first type is organic posts where marketers can create a post and publish on their brand’s Facebook page organically without paying for advertising. The reach to the number of audience with this type of posts would be limited due to Facebook’s algorithm.

The better version of social media posting is through Facebook ads. Through Facebook ads, marketers can almost accurately target ads at whoever meets their criteria settings. This ensures their ad campaigns are getting relatively high quality of clicks from the audience. The downside is that it is advertising, and marketers will have to keep paying the each ad click. As soon as they stop paying for the ads, the “traffic” stops coming in.

Blogs and blogging are essential backbone. Blogs are the container which can hold all the written content. Blogging must be developed into a plan with timetable. All your blog content/articles will be created according to the schedule in this timetable. Copywriters (or article writers) are needed for the production of all the content constantly for the whole year. Usually, hiring all the copywriters and putting them all in-house would be unrealistic due to budget restraint. The best approach to keep the cost down is to hire and coordinate with freelanced copywriters.

Repurposing content is a great approach. The concept behind repurposing your content is to actually reuse the already written content that have worked relatively well with one channel or one traffic source (e.g. in Facebook groups). The repurposed content may be reused in an email campaign through tool such as Sendinblue marketing automation capabilities, or a Pinterest campaign (as an infographic image). Another approach is to convert the written article into a verbal script and then have a voice-over person read/speak it out. Have the speech recorded into audio and integrate it into a video. Marketers would then publish the video on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and any other social media platforms that are appropriate.