The digital marketing mix
You need to spend money to make money. We’ve all heard that before, right? When you’re running a business, one of these spends is digital marketing. As a digital marketer in a small business, you need to spread your expenditure across a variety of channels. Below is a typical digital marketing channel mix for the Australian Fashion and Retail category, for instance. You need to spend money across all these channels. Especially take note of the organic search channel, which is a big chunk of marketing allocation, at 34%.
Internet growth has presented businesses with a variety of cost-effective marketing channels and tools. For the most part, this type of marketing is measurable and accountable, hence it’s also called performance marketing. By being measurable, this marketing is easier to justify and allocate spend.
One of the most accountable and measurable digital marketing channels is paid search, like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. You choose the keywords that you want your website ad to appear with in search results, and only pay for the click-throughs. The concept is really powerful. However, brands are pouring more and more money into this channel, making many of the search terms very expensive.
Did you know that some digital marketing is also free marketing?
All is not lost though. Some digital marketing methods are still free. Free marketing requires work to bring it to fruition, but it’s well worth it.
Customer reviews are one type of free digital marketing that can make a huge positive impact on your business. This is the single most potent way to drive business growth. Reviews about your company, products and services are free to receive and, if used well, can propel your business to new levels of success. Think of reviews as free marketing content created by your consumers.
You can collect many types reviews, but we recommend not getting too distracted by all the options. Some of the most important are:
- Yelp reviews
- Facebook reviews
- Truelocal reviews
- Trip Advisor reviews
You can also look at an expanded list of options.
However, the one review source that should be at the top of your shortlist is GoogleMyBusiness reviews.
Your Google reviews are free, use them
Google reviews are free for your customers to leave, super simple and carry a lot of marketing weight.
Here’s why:
- 90% of customers read reviews before engaging with a business.
- Almost 70% of customers read Google reviews.
- Google reviews account for over 20% of local search results, creating a significant impact.
- It costs nothing to collect a review from your customer.
With 34% of all traffic coming from organic search, reviews are very close to our heart here at Bring. We constantly strive to find more robust free content marketing tools for any business.
So if you haven’t already set up a GoogleMyBusiness profile, do it and start collecting reviews today.
