QUICK LINKS:

1. Facebook engagement
2. Tailor-fit advertisements
3. Social Media engagement
4. Proxies for Social Media
5. Linkedin Pulse
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
7. Proxies for SEO
8. Zest
9. Messenger Day

The game of marketing has evolved along with the advancement of technology. Gone are the days when brands compete for consumer’s attention using television and radio air time and print ads. Even telemarketing has lost its magic touch as companies fail to leverage that much by pestering leads with phone calls.

These days, the most effective channel to for a brand to leverage is through digital marketing. Why is this? Let us take a look at some statistics. As of 2017, there are more than 300 million Twitter users, around 700 million people on Instagram, and over 2 billion Facebook users. With these staggering numbers, it is then safe to say that almost everyone who has purchasing powers are online. And the best way to persuade them to buy your products and services is through advertisements in these platforms.

In this article, we will be giving you 9 marketing tools that don’t cost much. We do understand that marketing should not take up a lot of your budget so that you can reach your full potential in terms of profit. And hopefully, these 9 marketing tools will help you conquer the digital world. Well, maybe not really conquer it, but these tools will somehow get your products known to billions of active internet users and convert this knowledge into sales.

1. Facebook engagement

Facebook has the most number of users of all the social media platforms. 2 billion active users mean 2 billion people possibly getting to know your company and ultimately buying your products and services. Thus, it is just right that we start with Facebook as a digital marketing tool. Here is a tip though: it is not as simple as boosting a post or starting an ad campaign.

If you want people to know about your company and its products, you have to make some noise. The same way a baby cries to get his or her mother’s attention when hungry or wet, actually. You have to let people know that your company exists by creating posts that are personal and of value. When your posts are interesting and relevant, people will like, comment and even share it. This is the goal.

The key is that your target market has to be able to relate to your posts. A company that sell baby products, for example, will gain more followers and likes if they post about the struggles of raising a baby instead of merely letting people know about the products they are selling. So the next time you promote your products in Facebook, make sure to do it in an interesting and relatable manner. Keep your target market in mind and ask yourself: What do they want to see? What do they usually read? What keeps them interested?

2. Tailor-fit advertisements

Despite the huge number of people on Facebook, your ad campaign should not be limited to this social network. Post on other social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter, by all means. However, it is important to tailor-fit your ads or post according to the social media site you are posting to. The images you use on Facebook may look differently on Instagram and Twitter, while the text on your tweet may not be suitable for Facebook and Instagram.

Customize your posts depending on which site you are posting to in order to be more effective and believable. Make your posts interesting by adding images or videos, especially when on Twitter whose news feed gets easily occupied in a short period of time. Keep your posts from being buried by new posts by making it look interesting.

3. Social Media engagement

This may sound like a repeat of the number one on this list, but this time we will be talking about how to expand or grow post engagement in every major social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Let us face the fact that if your social media posts are not liked, commented on, and shared, then it won’t reach enough people to help you leverage your product (and ultimately convert this leverage to sales).

Therefore, post engagement is the key to making social media marketing effective. In order to ensure engagement, you would need multiple accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter (or all three if you decide to market on these three social media sites). The catch is that you may get banned for doing this. As it turns out, these sites usually allow only one account per user.

How do they find out that it’s still the same user? Through your IP address. In essence, these sites allow one account for every IP address. If they detect multiple accounts using the same IP address, the tendency is that the IP address will be blocked from their system.

4. Proxies for Social Media

There is a workaround to the dilemma in tool number 3 above. You would need to use proxies. Proxies work by hiding your real IP address so that when you visit a site, say Twitter, a different IP address will be detected, not your real one. For this reason, you can gain a lot of marketing benefits with proxy. Herein lies the solution to the banning issue mentioned previously.

The good thing about using proxies is that you can choose what IP address to use, or at least which proxy server to connect to. And since you will be able to use other IP addresses, then there won’t be any danger of getting blocked by any of the social media sites.

5. Linkedin Pulse

Linkedin is still a social media platform, but a more formal and business-like one. Posting articles on Linkedin will make you appear as an expert in the industry, thereby prompting people to trust your brand. A listicle about how to detect a fraudulent insurance company can attract more people compared to an outright advertisement about an insurance product.

When using this marketing tool, however, make sure that your articles are of high quality. People tend to shy away (and even avoid in the future) from posts or articles that have glaring grammatical and spelling errors. You may need to hire a writer and an editor, but it will be all worth it.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is perhaps the most widely used digital marketing tool these days. SEO is a technique by which a website can be visible in a search engine organic results. For example, you are an event organizer in Alabama. When people google “event organizers in Alabama”, your website should be the first (or at least one in the list) on the results page. That is if you have an effective SEO in place.

Without a good SEO technique, your website will be buried among the hundreds of sites that also don’t have SEO skills. If you own a website, then this is already common knowledge to you. You may even have SEO techniques in place which is good for you. The fact remains though: you really need to outrank your competitors so that you can reach your target market.

7. Proxies for SEO

Outranking your competitors in terms of search results can be made easier by using private proxies together with the SEO techniques you already have in place. As discussed earlier, proxies mask or hide your real IP address while visiting another website. You can choose which proxy server to connect to and what IP address to use.

So how is this relevant with search engine optimization? Just like traditional marketing, you also need to research about your competitors. A long time ago, this was painstakingly and manually done by each company. However, these days, you can already use link indexing tools that will tell you where your competitors are getting their links.

Sources of links vary. It could be a comment on a blog post, a share on Facebook, or a guest blog post. Whatever the source of the links, you have to imitate it in your own website in order to get results. But rest assured, you will really see results. It is important to remember though that using tools that send a lot of queries for URLs at once might get you banned. This is where proxies come in handy. You can use your proxies while doing competitor research in order to avoid being banned.

Furthermore, proxies also allow you to do data scraping without any hassle. Data scraping is the process of getting pertinent data such as URLs of blogs that can get you backlinks if you comment, metadata, keywords, page title, and the likes. Basically everything you need in order to know what the competition is effectively doing. It is a major player in search engine optimization and all top ranking websites employ this method.

As a matter of fact, you can create a whole SEO technique just by data scraping. All these cannot be done manually though. Well, technically you can do it manually. It would just be tedious and time consuming. Some websites even pay SEO experts thousands of dollars to do data scraping for them.

However, you can actually save a lot of money if you do it yourself. And this post is about marketing tools that don’t cost much anyway, and paying SEO experts thousands of dollars is not one of them.

Now back to data scraping. You would need to use tools such as ScrapeBox which will also do search engine harvesting and webpage meta scraper. If you use a tools such as this without a proxy, however, you will be automatically banned. So you need to buy private proxies in order to get all the data you need for an effective SEO campaign. Private proxies cost way less than hiring an SEO expert, so you can still get the most of your money.

8. Zest

Zest is a chrome extension you can use in order to recommend articles about marketing. As digital marketers, it is a great way to learn more about the current trend in the industry in terms of technique and content. Techniques and methods in digital marketing are constantly changing and upgrading. What may be effective today may not yield the same results in, say, six to twelve months. Therefore, it is important to stay tuned to the latest news and trends in the industry. Zest keeps you up to date.

9. Messenger Day

People use Messenger Day all the time. However, you should not ignore this seemingly simple platform as it has a large capacity to grow your business. Messenger Day actually allows anyone to call you. You can brand your business by posting on Messenger Day and letting people know that they can reach you anytime.

The Bottom Line

The game has changed in the world of marketing. If your business won’t enter the digital realm, then you can easily get suppressed by your competitors. Worse, you will find it difficult to reach your target market. And even if you do digital marketing, you also need techniques that will help you outrank your competitors. With thousands of businesses and websites popping up every day, you can easily get buried in the world wide web.

It is a good thing that social media sites can help you in promoting your company’s products and services. You just have to create valuable and interesting posts with images and videos. If you have a website, you can also employ SEO techniques in order to be visible in search results.

The sales conversion in using these two digital marketing tools – social media and SEO – can further be increased by using them together with proxies.

Proxies keep you from being banned from sites when you do your marketing strategies in social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Proxies works the same way when you do competitor research and web scraping to enhance your SEO techniques. These 9 marketing tools that don’t cost much will hopefully help you leverage your product and services in the digital world. Good luck!

Try to check also this web scraping guide for more learnings.

Also try this Ebook: An Ultimate Guide to Content Curation with Web Scraping.

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