When it comes to starting your business you may be wondering if now is the right time? Well I am here to tell you that there are major household names that were started during recessions these include:

• 1908: GM launched in
• 1953: Burger King
• 1957: Hyatt
• 1971: FedEx
• 1973: Microsoft
• 1980: CNN
• 2008: Airbnb
• 2009: Uber

I am not saying that you need to start your business during a recession to become a million or billion-dollar company, but if you are considering starting one, then now might be the right time!

Social media marketing techniques have become more prominent in today’s business landscape. Business owners have become more interested in the role that digital marketing plays in a business’s overall success.

One feature, mainly, is the cost of social media marketing that successful companies spend. To put things into perspective, Brian Dean of Backlink reports that about 4.48 billion users are currently active on social media worldwide. Not only that, the number of active users is expected to increase from here on.

As social media acts as the bridge between clients and businesses, a working foundation of this bridge would be necessary for businesses to solidify their presence, reputation, and sales in this digital age. Additionally, research shows that more consumers are slowly adapting to gathering their insights on a particular business digitally as opposed to traditional marketing.

As a result, most experts recommend that businesses strengthen their social media presence to reach their target audience and heighten their engagement easily.

In this article, you will find out about the current financial costs and time spent by businesses and the ideal amount you should invest, depending on the qualities of your local business.

Infographics are great, but it’s tricky to create them. You need to work smart to strike a balance between creativity and the value it brings about. The internet is getting overwhelming over the years, and it’s important to share information with the audience in a smart way. And, that’s when businesses try to focus on tools like infographics which allow you to share information with eye-catching and appealing visuals.

An infographic lets you convey complex information in a concise and simple way. Infographics have become quite popular due to the fact that people prefer content that is short, yet informative. Infographics also offer a number of benefits from a digital marketing point of view. The visual element of the infographics allows the readers to remember the information for a longer period of time, which is great for brand awareness.

If you want your digital marketing strategy to stand out, you must invest time in creating attention-grabbing infographics. The information infographics convey is often complex, the process of making an infographic doesn’t have to be.

Let us now explain how to create an effective infographic in 5 steps. These steps will make the overall process easier.

Every month, private and Christian schools spend millions of dollars on marketing and advertising. However, most of us do not have that kind of budget, so we need more viable advertising ideas for our school. In this article, I’ll go over the two major types of school marketing and advertising: those that take time (grassroots marketing) and those that take money (advertising).

Before we get into the various ways to advertise a school, it’s critical to recognize the absolute importance of marketing within a private school’s business operations. When a private Christian school is up and running and receiving a steady stream of new students, you should be reinvesting at least 10-12 percent of your revenue in your school’s marketing.

Admittedly, there are times when a school may be forced to reduce its school marketing budget. This usually happens when policies change, or the board feels there is an impending recession and wants to “save money.” If that happens to you, then you have to simultaneously increase the amount of time you spend on your marketing efforts (that’s the school marketing budget equation detailed more below). You absolutely cannot reduce your “total” marketing: the combination of paid advertising, promotional events, grassroots outreach, etc. If you cut back, your school will inevitably fall into a downward spiral of declining enrollments.

Before Anything, Know Who You Are Marketing To

How do you compete when your marketing and advertising budget is limited? The key, in my opinion, is to stay focused on your students. Know who they are and what they want. You can only effectively market your school’s programs without spending too much money trying out “new” school advertising ideas. There is no one-size-fits-all advertising channel for private schools, so you must know your target market. After that, you’ll understand the two most important aspects of a successful marketing campaign:

1. Where they spend their time
2. Who do they trust

Knowing those two things will help you determine where to market your school and who the influencers are for your target personas. While it’s unlikely that you’ll get the influencers to endorse or even be a spokesperson, you can at the very least use that knowledge to know how the message should be worded, packaged, and delivered.

I work with schools and small businesses all the time who say, “We know who our target market is.” The truth is, we never know for sure where all of our target markets are. As a school, you must constantly inquire about the habits and backgrounds of students, graduates, parents, and potential employers. When you make an effort to conduct survey-based market research, you’ll be surprised at how many new niches emerge.

The Marketing Budget: Money x Effort

I always tell schools and small businesses that their marketing plans should be seen as a combination of money and effort.

• Money is spent on gaining quick awareness, which doesn't take a lot of hours to complete, unlike advertising and sponsorships.
• Effort requires people and time. These include interactions on social networks, attending industry gatherings, and even hitting the pavement on weekends to pass out flyers at coffee shops.

Suppose your school's marketing budget is being reduced due to the current economic situation. In that case, you MUST counterbalance that reduction in spending with an increase in effort so that "total marketing" remains at the level required to keep enrolling new students.

4 Low-Cost but Time-Intensive School Marketing Ideas

Social Media Marketing

First, let me say that social media marketing is not the same as advertising on social media. Social media interactions are humbling because you're asking and hoping for people to like and follow your private school. You should be spending an hour each day posting something related to your school and searching for other pages and people who might be interested in you. You need to like or follow them, say hello, and tell them about your school, but don't give them a sales pitch. Remember, it's called social media, not sales media. Make sure that all your recent graduates, current students, and parents like your page or are fans.

If your school can provide a service, consider hosting online competitions with voting or polls on your social media pages. Engage your faculty in posting interesting content. You're doing well if you can manage at least three good posts per day while also finding, liking, and getting to know new businesses and people.

Have a High-Quality Blog on Your Website

Many schools see blogging as a mental impasse. Instead, you should think of it as article publishing, information marketing, or content marketing. The Internet is all about accessing information and getting your information out there so the search engines (read Google) can find it. This way, anyone interested in your school will most likely start there. They will be looking for the basic information about your school and what you can offer in the name of a private school education. Using your website blog for content marketing will help prospective parents and students find you while also demonstrating your expertise and increasing your authority in the industry. This is why large universities have their professors write books to establish topic authority and prestige for the institution.

SEO for Your Private or Christian School Website

Regarding SEO for your private school website, you can hire someone for pennies to leave a link to your website in the comments section of other blogs, forums, and the like. Still, Google and the other search engines are smart, and they can detect lousy link building and potentially penalize your site in its search ranking. Do it right by posting great content that people will want to link to. Marketing your school on article websites can be time-consuming, but it is extremely beneficial to search engine rankings. The key is to obtain high-quality backlinks to your own website.

Be Seen as the Expert

Find local magazines or websites and contact the reporters or publishers. Make suggestions and pitch your own articles for publication. You can increase the authority of your school by being published and “giving away” some information in the form of articles, tutorial videos, and even short papers that people can download as PDFs.

3 Private School Marketing Ideas That Cost Money, but Not Much Time

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

This needs to be the foundation of any modern private school’s advertising and marketing strategy. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) continues to have the highest conversion rates of any advertising channel, and it’s easy to see why. For example, a person who goes to Google and types “private schools in Charlotte” is a very hot lead. They know exactly what they want and where to get it. Now all you have to do is close the deal. However, it should be noted that private schools MUST be tracking these leads and utilizing a good CRM.

Email Newsletters

Email marketing can be relatively inexpensive, but it also requires constant refinement, more so than other channels. Email is best used as a reminder rather than a method to find new leads for private and Christian schools. Yes, you can buy email lists and get a few leads here and there, but the cost per student is usually prohibitively high. When sending emails to your list, ensure that everything you send is interesting and valuable to the person receiving it. If all you send is announcements of your next open house, they’ll mark your emails as spam and never open them again. Therefore, your email marketing should be highly targeted and informative.

Accept That Enrolling Students Is Sales

This is often difficult to accept for those in private education, but marketing your school is just as much about sales as it is about anything else. Spend money on hiring a good, aggressive recruiter if your inquiry-to-enrollment ratio is low. Successful schools have recruiters sending emails, calling back leads to schedule a tour of the school and a meeting with an admissions representative. You can spend as much money as you want on advertising, but a large portion of it will be wasted if you don't have a sales team that can close the deal.

Final Thoughts

We have covered several things in this post. While you can do many things to market your school via a grassroots method, by far your best bet is to use the power of the internet and SEM to truly bring in the students.

At Cube Creative Design my staff and I are here to help you do just that. Therefore if you want to explore the possibilities of utilizing digital marketing to increase your enrollment, then reach out to me today!

So, you’re thinking about digital marketing on Facebook and how you can use it to grow your local small business. Because of Facebook’s huge audience clout, it can give you a lot of opportunities to engage with a new audience and extend your company’s reach.

Right now, you may have questions about digital marketing Facebook, which this guide can hopefully clarify. How can I start Facebook marketing, and how can I make it work for my business?

What strategies can I use for effective Facebook marketing? What is the cost of Facebook marketing for my business, and when can I see results from marketing through this platform?

These questions and more are explained to guide you on what you should do to increase consumer and client engagement and website traffic using Facebook.

When marketing your small business on the internet, there are several ways to do it. One such method is through Google Ads, sometimes called pay-per-click or PPC ads.

There are numerous pros and cons to this marketing, such as:

1. Pro: Your return on investment is nearly double what you spend
2. Con: Mistakes can cost you dearly
3. Pro: Ads will let you send people to specific landing pages
4. Con: You pay for clicks regardless of conversion 
5. Pro: Get a leg up on your smaller competitors
6. Con: Hard to compete with bigger companies
7. Pro: Google Ads can help you focus on the local market
8. Con: Keyword pricing can impact your budget

I would be missed if I didn’t also mention that most small businesses will usually spend between $9,000 and $10,000 per month on PPC ads, or as little as a few hundred dollars. Also, the potential of Google Ads is practically limitless.

You may be saying, “this is great, but what about the click-through rate of Google Ads?” “Or how is this going to help me get more business?” Well, that is a bit more of a loaded question that I hope to address in this article further, so without further adieu, let’s get to it!

Need help on how to use social media to grow your business? Indeed, for any business to succeed in the modern era, first, it should build a strong social media presence.

Using social media allows businesses to:

• Improve their online presence.
• Generate more leads.
• Boost sales by getting viral.
• Retarget past clients.
• Get valuable feedback for better business engagement.

If your boss does not believe in the idea of Social Media Marketing (SMM), perhaps you should spend more time with him, convincing him that the social platform will work for his business, as it works with businesses that have already been using these platforms.

In fact, 65% of small businesses are on social media to increase leads. Also, 78% of small businesses use social platforms to drive traffic to their website, and if your business aims to build a loyal following, you must engage with your clients via the social media platforms.

According to the Social Media Examiner, 79% of small businesses use social media platforms to engage with consumers to make loyal followers out of them.

 

 

Social Media Goals for Businesses

If your business does not use social media to build its online presence, it will lag behind the competition, as your competitors are taking advantage of this platform now. 

Even small local businesses that target local consumers can use social media to build awareness for their business, services and products. 

The goal for any business is to attract new clients, and the first step towards reaching that goal is to let your target prospects know that you exist. The next step is to turn them into loyal clients who will give more leads as time goes by and the relationship grows.

And that is what social media platforms can offer – opportunities to engage with new faces that you can turn into clients and then loyal patrons.

Ways to persuade your boss to give social media a try

Here are strategies to make your boss say “yes” to your proposition on how to grow your business with social media.

1) Tell him the number of social media users is increasing on a daily basis. 

Statista reports that social media usage is increasing year after year. In 2020, 3.6 billion people all over the world were using social media, and that number will increase to 4.41 billion in 2025.

Statista also includes data on time spent using the internet. Based on their study, internet users spend 144 minutes per day on messaging apps and social media. The increase is more than half an hour compared to the data gathered in 2015.

With these billions of people to target, it is easy to get a slice of this huge market to attract people to engage with your business on social media. However, knowing which people to target is the key to your social media marketing efforts. For that, you need to segment your market so you will not be spending money on market segments that are not interested in your products or services.

Also, before you rush to create your social media profiles, understand your target market first and the channels they use. You want to engage with your audience where you can find them.

For instance, B2B companies must use the LinkedIn social platform. That is because it is where B2B companies can get their leads. According to Hubspot, 80% of leads generated by B2B companies are generated through LinkedIn.

Is your small business targeting Generation Z? According to the same Hubspot source, you can find this market on Snapchat. 71% of these people use Snapchat at least six times per day.

2) You can encourage audience participation on social media

Besides being costly, offline marketing hardly encourages audience interaction. The rare occurrences of interaction happen only when the client goes to visit a physical store, and these can be very, very rare occasions. But this is now a thing of the past.

Today, you can devise ways to make your audience engage more with you with your posts on social media. You can encourage them to “tag a friend in the comments below” or tell them to share your post with their friends and family.

Overall, this will boost audience interaction with your business. Other marketers like to post competition that will help encourage their audience to like, share, or comment. Make sure to reward your audience with freebies in return for their participation.

Be proactive on social media with the following strategies:

Talk about your topic and its relevance to your audience

Do not only talk about yourself, your business, and your products on social media. Today, businesses should be consumer-centric.

Join Q&A sessions

Your target audience wants to know what’s on your mind about pressing issues they experience.

Share other people’s content

Share the content from influencers in your niche. In turn, they will also take the time to share your content with their followers.

Make your post visuals

 Do not just use text. Use images, Infographics, videos, and other engaging types of content.

Create polls and surveys

One of the best ways to market on social media is to have varying activities to share with your audience. Polls and surveys sound interesting to some people, while others want to learn through seminars, training, and those kinds of stuff. 

3) Social media marketing is cost-effective

Videos, images, and tweets are free to post on social media pages, and they stay there for an indefinite time without you costing a single dollar while your posts promote your business.

Unlike billboard and TV ads that are stopped from being shown when you stop paying the fees, your social media content stays online, working for you while reducing your marketing costs.

Targeted campaigns that reduce costs

Another thing with social media is that they allow a highly targeted campaign for their users. This way, users advertise only the demographics that they want to reach.

Also, it allows them to easily track success and adjust their marketing campaign depending on the results. Thus, using social media to promote your business is really cost-effective.

Platforms that offer cheap paid advertising services

When starting with your social media marketing, study the platforms that will work effectively and well with your budget. If your platform is Instagram, you can post your content for free and at the same time, use the platform’s paid advertising system, which is really cheap.

Depending on the paid advertising bidding model, you will pay Instagram only $0.20 to $2 per click (for the cost-per-click model) and only $6.70 per 1,000 impressions (cost per impressions model).

Other platforms also charge low rates per 1,000 impressions, including LinkedIn ($6.59), Twitter ($6.46), and YouTube ($9.68). Pinterest charges $30 per 1,000 impressions.

Use social marketing tools.

Also, there are available tools that can help you with your social media content marketing at a low price. Companies like SEM RUSH offer social media marketing tools that can cost you less than $150 per month.

Here’s the thing. For small businesses, web-based media is no longer a choice. It is a need, particularly for those who need to make every dollar stretch.

4) Social media is a prelude to user-generated content that brings a lot of benefits

You must explain to your boss the possibility of your business earning user-generated content via social media. First, explain to him “what is user-generated content.”

User-generated content is highly valuable, especially for strategizing for social media for local businesses. It is content willingly contributed by your audience to describe their relationship with your business and their assessment of your business as a whole.

The benefits of such content include:

• It saves the business time in creating content.
• It serves as a promotional testimony of how good a business is.
• User-generated content promotes interaction and engagement.
• User-generated content generates more leads and sales.

User-generated content usually follows after establishing an online presence and creating a loyal client base. So, those two things must be established first.

When these two things are present, your loyal followers will just naturally post comments and recommendations to buy your products and share their testimonials about you and the good that your business is doing.

Work on generating more user-generated content

Some social media tips for small businesses to follow to encourage your users to generate content for you include:

Feature your clients’ reviews and feedback

Acknowledging what your clients say about you while you talk about them when promoting your business or conducting a webinar can make them feel really good about themselves.

Then, they will take more about you.

Host events

Company events are channels that allow your followers to share what they think about your products and services. Give your audience lots of chances to talk about how they engage with you and what they love about your business.

Incentivize your clients

Everyone loves discounts, free coupons, offers, etc. So, use these tokens to express appreciation and make sure you always create something unique and unexpected for your followers.

In response, your loyal fans will use actions as currency, and that means more tweets, video uploads, and photo sharing with their friends.

For this reason, check the trends that your followers follow and try to see these as opportunities to encourage them to generate more user-generated content for your business.

5) Social media allows your business to engage using multiple platforms

Social media is a multiple-channel platform. It means that you have many options on how to promote business on social media, but it might not be productive to use all these platforms at once. It can be costly and time-consuming if you do that.

Facebook

Facebook is great if you are targeting lots of varieties of people by using social media to grow your business. For instance, you are selling clothes for people of different ages. Then your segmentation will have a wide range of consumers with different demographics.

The main advantage of Facebook for businesses is that its demographic variations are not limited the way LinkedIn and Twitter are limited. LinkedIn and Twitter typically cater to a specific demographic only.

Instagram

Instagram is also a fast-growing platform, but it caters for the most part to the young generation. It is similar to Pinterest as it relies on videos and photos for conversation and engagement. Thus, visual-based businesses should be using Instagram and Pinterest, and some examples would be beauty, food, and art.

Twitter

Social media advertising on Twitter can help businesses grow their audience, promote products, and drive traffic to their websites. With Twitter, you can build your account to gain followers and promote tweets to build engagement and boost campaign visibility.

Twitter is a platform where niche-specific conversations occur. 

It is, therefore, practical for Twitter users to build their niche by following and using tweets to share trending news in the same industry.

So, you still have YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc., to consider. Check the following stats for percentages of usage among small businesses (Source: Clutch 2018 Small Business Survey:

• Facebook – 86%
• Instagram – 48%
• YouTube – 46%
• Twitter – 44%
• LinkedIn – 31%
• Snapchat – 25%

Still, the first thing you should consider is the platform where your target market goes. How effective is the platform’s system in helping you engage with your target audience?

More compelling stats to persuade your boss from Bright Local

Here are eight relevant stats from Bright Local about how you can use social media to promote your small business:

• 30% of millennials engage with companies on social media at least once per month.
• 6 out of 10 baby boomers search for promos on social media.
• The use of social media for marketing is prevalent among B2B marketers, with 83% saying they use social media to promote brands.
• Social media is a medium where businesses can find feedback about their business. About 4 out of 10 people express their feelings about brands on social media.
• One in every four shoppers tends to be influenced by social media influencers.
• 53% of consumers following brands on social media are highly likely to become loyal patrons of the brands they follow.
• About 75% of online searchers looking for nearby stores visit a physical store that same day, and 30% of them actually make a purchase.
• Social proof that praises a company for its services influences buyers. About 50% of Americans find comments like this helpful when deciding whether to buy or not to buy.

Show your boss how to actually find your target clients on social media

Since you cannot target everyone on social media because that will be costly for your business, you ought to find a way to target only the right people, and the right people are those who need the products or services you offer. 

Here are the simple steps: 

Know and create the buyer persona of your business

This is also called audience segmentation. Some marketers even do hyper-segmentation to really know who truly needs their products. So, they do not spend a single dollar on uninterested consumers.

So here, you ask about your target market’s age, income, jobs, interests, hobbies, etc. Then you ask about the pain points of your audience or the issues they have because that is what you want to talk about with them. You want to talk about something interesting and helpful to your target audience.

Find out where they are

Now that you have your buyer persona, you want to know where these people hang out on social media? Are they on Facebook? Know that the Silent generation has increased their use of Facebook in recent years. 

• Or are they on Twitter? Know that 64% of Twitter users are 18 to 49 years old. 
• If their ages are between 18 and 34 years old, they are also probably on Instagram, too.
• Check your competitors, as they can be a bastion of helpful data to you. What kind of posts do their audiences engage with? What hashtags do they use? 

Also, what keywords work for them?

Is it okay for you to also use those keywords, so you also attract traffic organically using those keywords?

Of course, you will also need the help of professional social media marketing specialists to help draft a template for your social media marketing campaigns. 

Conclusion

In summary, the benefits your business can get from social media marketing include: 

• Advanced targeting that saves money but reaches the right prospects
• An easy way to build credibility by highlighting product reviews and brand personality
• Working with influencers that can easily help boost sales and awareness
• Posting relatable content that can easily go viral on the internet
• Generation of user-generated content without spending a penny
• Allows fast response to complaints, so better customer service is provided

There is no question that your business should explore social media platforms to promote your products and services. 

If you need help on how to get started right on social media marketing, contact Cube Creative Design, where social media marketing specialists will help design marketing campaigns that work well for your niche and brand.

Whether you’re starting a new business or growing an existing one, having a strong online presence for your small business is critical. Therefore in order to grow your business, you need to think about all our marketing efforts from offline to online.

Here are 25 fundamental marketing strategies to help you grow your small business:

If you are in a service and trades industry, the biggest question I get is, “should I list pricing for my services and products on my website?” This idea brings up many varying opinions about this practice.

Some people believe it’s just stupid to list your prices on your website before you are able to show the value of your products or services compared to others in your industry to potential clients. Some are afraid consumers will get sticker shock, turn away, and not come back. You want the ability to demonstrate higher quality and WHY you are better than your competitors.

In some ways, I agree with this assessment. There are some businesses that need to demonstrate their value before scaring potential clients away.

We can assume two things about this business, though:

1. Their website doesn’t demonstrate their value, which requires a personal sales interaction to prove their worth, and
2. They are looking for any consumer, including those who are price shopping.

They are right in both of these cases - pricing should not go on the website.

However, if you are distinct and stand out from your competition, adding a pricing page on your service-based website can be a great key to success for your small business.

Before going any further, let us agree on one thing. The main goals of your school's website are to leave a lasting impression, educate, and inform prospective students and parents. To achieve this, you need a functional and high-quality website. 

Sure, you can sign up for an online web design course or use one of the many do-it-yourself web page building solutions you can find online. You can even ask one of your students to create a decent website for you. It may only cost you some pizza money.

However, you need to understand that you are investing in a website that will showcase your school to prospective students and, more importantly, their parents. You can best do that with a website that provides a great user experience, reliability, and design.

Here are some factors to consider when choosing between do-it-yourself websites and professionally made ones:

You might be wondering, am I hungry? Why else would I be talking about EATing?

Well, if you are hungry to grow your business, focusing on your E-A-T will help you!

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness and is what the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) look at to determine help your web page’s quality.

E-A-T is critical because the higher the quality of your web page, the more likely it will show in search results and attract more visitors and traffic.

So let’s break it down. What exactly is E-A-T, and how can you prove to Google that your site has it?

Which is better, a small digital marketing agency or a large one? The short answer is it depends on your needs. 

Don’t you love my vagueness there! 

Before diving into this topic, let’s define a small school by student enrollment. Educators and researchers have not come to a clear consensus on what constitutes a “small” school or a “large” school. Research indicates, however, that an appropriate and effective size is 300-400 students for an elementary school and 400-800 students for a secondary school. Now, I care to bet your private school falls somewhere below that. 

If you are a large school, you might think that you need a large agency, and if you are a small school, you may think that a smaller agency might be the best fit. I would argue that it’s a moot point. It boils down to whether you want your school to be a number, or would you rather have a deeper personal relationship with your agency?

Think about this, if you look at Dunbar’s Number, which according to Wikipedia, “is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.”

Ideally, it is somewhere around 150 people. This includes your work colleagues, clients, family, friends, or other interpersonal relationships. Therefore, an agency with around 100-150 active monthly clients is a good starting number as this is most likely spread across a handful of people.

Let’s look at a small agency versus a large agency.