With many forms of marketing for business owners, which form of marketing gives you the biggest return on investment? If you are starting out with a new business you could spend £1000’s within your first year dramatically reducing the survival rate of your business. The UK stats for new businesses failing within the year is one in three (as of 2014). Spending too much money with poor marketing is the biggest factor for new businesses failing. In this article i will explain how and where you should focus your marketing budget to ensure you receive enquiries without blowing the bank account within your first few months.
The cheapest and most effective form of marketing is through the internet. From desktops to smartphones and tablets, everyone has access to the Internet at their fingertips. Now with 4G, smartphones now have around 30mb download speed (faster than a lot of broadband providers). This means your company can be visible to millions of potential clients, if you know the right places to focus on.
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Get A Website
The first stage of your Internet marketing is to get a website. This will be the middleman from the Internet to the client contacting you. There are so many web designers around with prices ranging from being free to £1000+ but picking the right one reflects all the below stages of gaining customers. Picking the wrong one could end up costing you a lot of money.
To start with you need to purchase a domain name (eg, www.yourcompany.co.uk) and hosting package. With 123 Reg you can get these for around £80 per year.
You can purchase a great looking WordPress theme for around $55, which is around £37 on ThemeForest. WordPress is the easiest platform around allowing you to edit all aspects of your site with ease, and most important of all, its great for ranking on Google.
Using Fiverr you can get someone to customize your theme with your images, logo and content etc for $55, which is around £37.
DOMAIN, HOSTING & WEBSITE = £154
Get People Viewing Your Website
Just because you have a website it doesn’t mean people will see it. The chances are nobody will, you need an Internet Marketing package and SEO (search engine optimisation). A proper Internet marketing company will work on your website and promote it in the right places to help climb the rankings on Google. If your position 1-3 on the first pages of Google for your keywords you will receive 1000’s of visitors to your website each month. Unfortunately there are 1000’s of internet marketing companies who do not know what they are doing and will just take your money without getting ranked on Google.
I suggest using SixtyMarketing for your Internet Marketing and SEO as they have been in the industry since 2002, they have a great track record of achieving 1st page Google rankings and have nothing but great reviews. You can get on the first page of Google with SixtyMarketing for around £55 per month and this comes with a money back guarantee if they don’t. Unsure if this is a promotional offer or this is what they supply with all new clients.
INTERNET MARKETING – £55 per month.
Social Media
Getting your business on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will get your companies name spread worldwide quickly. SixtyMarketing setup all social media accounts for you and attract interactions and new followers with the above package but I would also suggest doing a small bit of Facebook marketing to get targeted Likes from people who share the same interests as your business.
FACEBOOK MARKETING – £30 per month
How Much Does It All Cost then?
With your new company you should start with focusing on Internet Marketing over other forms of advertising to begin with. It is the cheapest form of marketing giving you the biggest return on investment.
SETUP COST = £154
MONTHLY COSTS = £85 per month
With the average conversion rate for website visitors to sales being 2%, your website with Internet marketing and Facebook Marketing will attract at least 4000 monthly visitors, more or less depending on your industry.
4000 VISITORS @ 2% CONVERSION RATE = 80 MONHTLY SALES
Most magazine companies charge around £500 per month to display your advert. These local magazines have 100 of competitors all in a same small space and the 53 people we asked if this form of marketing works, they all replied no. Its far too expensive against the return on investment.