5 Cost-Effective (Free) Strategies To Accelerate Your Digital Marketing

1 July, 2020 Richard Conway

The past few months have created a huge upsurge in online traffic and communication. Throughout March, April and May, Google in New Zealand saw an increase in use of approximately 70%, and Facebook saw about a 60% increase in traffic. This massive increase has pawned various opportunities and underlined the importance of a digital strategy.

Below, I’ve curated the best cost-effective (i.e. free) strategy opportunities that have emerged from this upsurge to accelerate any business’ digital marketing campaign.

1. Free Stuff – The beauty of online is that there are lots of opportunities out there that are either free, or at least almost free. A couple of great examples are the Facebook group set up by Sarah Colcord (New Zealand Made Products). Over a short period, the group grew from inception to a hugely engaged group with over 500,000 New Zealand members. Sarah allows businesses to post their New Zealand made products or services at no charge to her huge audience and the results can be spectacular.

Two other great channels are www.manaaki.io, which gives small businesses owners the opportunity to ask a host of experts for advice and opinion, and www.sosbusiness.nz, which allows small businesses the ability to generate revenue by selling vouchers to customers or receiving goodwill donations at no cost.

2. Google My Business – Local search marketing has always been important, but with the seismic shift to buying local, it is more critical than ever. Ensuring you have a properly completed and updated Google My Business profile is a must.

Google has updated this recently and launched a host of new tools to help small business. Details of these can be found here.

3. Google Rankings – It is common knowledge that producing high quality, unique content is a valuable strategy for Google rankings. However, something less commonly known is that Google is shifting towards incentivising websites that have a great user experience.

In May 2020, Google made the unusual announcement that they are releasing the “Google Page Experience Ranking Update” in 2021. Being aware of this early means that website owners and developers can get ahead of their competition by integrating this into their strategy immediately.

4. Google Shopping – If you are an e-commerce business, Google Shopping is a great way to showcase your products at a reasonably low cost. Even better (or cheaper) is that in April 2020, Google announced the upcoming launch of Google Surfaces; a free version of Google Shopping that allows e-commerce businesses to display rich organic (free) shopping ads via Google.
Additionally, if your business had an active Google Ads account for ten out of the twelve months in 2019, you would have also received free credit to use as ad-spend across all its platforms until the end of 2020. More details here.

5. Barnacle SEO – The concept behind this is that you attach yourself to something or someone that has a large audience. By doing so, you get some benefit from that audience yourself. A good example would be to find people or businesses that are influential to your target market. Connect with them and collaborate, it could be in the form of a podcast, blog, interview or paid promotion. This can be really effective and cheap to implement. The important thing to remember is to measure the results and learn from them to dictate future strategy.
In the current environment, digital marketing is a must. Our own business has doubled down on all our marketing efforts in order to begin to grow again and take our share of the growing market. Many businesses have suffered hard over the past few months, yet despite this, they should still be investing in digital marketing; even if that investment is just your time.