Marketing Engagement: A Strategy on a Zero Budget

The Ice Bucket Challenge. #NOH8. Even the 2008 presidential election.

Moments like these remind us that marketing success does not necessarily need multimillion-dollar investments, flashy marketing tools or complicated technologies. Technologies these days can allow us to market to our audiences without blowing a budget. With the right strategy and thinking, you can market effectively with very little additional funds

The tools below were inspired by The Digital Marketing Podcast. Hosted by Target Internet’s Daniel Rowles and Ciaran Rodgers, the podcast outlines efficient ways to develop online content using limited resources. We’ve taken their thinking a step further, and created a cheat sheet for a solid digital marketing strategy. The best part? These steps don’t require any money — just the minds (and creativity) of your employees.

Step 1: Build Your Brand Message

At the heart of every solid marketing campaign is a core message. And that message is brought to life through “hygiene content,” or your basic brand collateral (such as your website, blog, email blast template and social media profiles). Effective hygiene content answers the following questions early and often: Who is your organization? What is the service or product you provide? Who would find your product useful? At Delucchi Plus, we answer these questions by developing a “messaging platform” for clients, which outlines and describes a business’s core messages for use in all of its materials.

Building out hygiene content benefits your business in a few ways. It creates a foundation that adds quality content to your online channel and feels robust to the visitor. It also establishes your website in a way that tells Google you have a quality website that should be indexed (be placed within Google’s search rankings). And finally, it starts the process for your team to develop and implement routine content on your page, so that your audience knows when to expect your content.

Step 2: Beef Up Your Brand’s Custom Content

Once your main points are in place, it’s time to create useful, interesting custom branded content, also known as “hub content.” At its most basic level, this draws your intended audience to your business. through posts that discuss the state of your industry or the services that are relevant and valuable to your audience. Hub content can help readers make a decision or understand the industry in more detail. It can also entertain your audience, and encourage them to take an action about your product or service, such as “schedule a tour,” “attend our event,” “share with friends” and more.

Your hub content can use the same distribution schedule and process as your initial hygiene content. At this point, your audience begins visiting your page on a routine basis and engaging with your content.

Step 3: Make Waves with Hero Content

Once you have set your foundation of content and a good rhythm for engaging your audience, knock it out of the park with occasional hero content, or more complex, long-term content marketing pieces (like white papers, infographics and even podcasts) that get you the most traffic. These pieces can help create real value for consumers, inspire customer loyalty and position you as an expert in your industry.

The core of digital content marketing is about creating items of real interest and value to your audience, distributing them at the right moments and on the right channels, and then amplifying and syndicating them with a highly targeted approach.

Want to learn more about how we help develop content marketing strategies to engage audiences online? Check out how we do engagement or contact us to talk through how we can help you.