Learning how to market a product on a tight budget is not as difficult as you think. It requires that you learn how to combine content marketing with email marketing then amplify your effort with a combination of social media marketing and influencer marketing.  These 4 strategies are all you really need if you’re committed.

The alternative to learning these 4 strategies is hiring a sales team and paying for advertising.  Obviously, not much of an option if you’re on a tight budget or if you have no budget at all.

That’s the beauty of what I’m sharing in this post.  The only thing required is time and conviction. The goal of the content shared below is to provide you with the ultimate learners guide to deploy your time and conviction so that you can save money while you market your product and increase your sales.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing tactic used to create conversations around content instead of aggressively pushing someone down a sales conversion funnel. Typically, these conversations are created by educating or entertaining the target audience that you want to eventually buy from you. To do this, you must become a go to person for content in your niche.

The goal of content marketing is to first build your audience, then segment that audience into non-qualified and qualified sales leads.

At first, you may think that you should ignore the non-qualified sales leads. However, that’s a mistake. The bigger your audience, the more authority you will have in your industry.  As a result, non-qualified sales lead could lead to a boost in word-of-mouth.

Below are the 9 content techniques that you must learn how to use effectively to become a master at content marketing

1. Blogging (for link building)
2. Guest posting  (for link building)
3. Press Releases (for link building)
4. Whitepapers/ebooks (for authority)
5. Presentations/Training Courses (for authority)
6. Infographics (for authority)
7. Webinars (for authority)
8. Videos (for authority)
9. Podcasting (for authority)

If you are looking for ideas on what type of content you should create to market your product, I suggest you read this epic post with 21 must have content types.  It provides detailed ideas for headlines and subject matter that you must consider when you are marketing your product.

Email Marketing

As soon as you start implementing your first content marketing technique, you must immediately begin to build your email list.  According to iContact, people who subscribe to your email list will spend up to 83% more than those who don’t.  In addition, according to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has a 40 to 1 ROI.

The reason for this is that the email marketing has a killer conversion rate. Check out this graph below:

Source: Monetate
Conversion rate by email, search, and social

As you can see, email marketing is more than 450% better than social media marketing when it comes to converting a visitor into a customer. That’s a big difference, and that is why email marketing is the first thing you combine with content marketing instead of social media marketing.

To master email marketing, you must learn these 5 techniques

1. Call to action messaging (to get people to subscribe)
2. Segmentation (it will increase revenue by 24%)
3. Personalization (for abandoned shopping carts and for people who you haven’t heard from in a long time)
4. Responsive email design (to support mobile, tablets, and desktop)
5. A/B Testing (to maximize the open rate by trying different from lines and subject lines)
6. Email Cross Promotions (using the Nichevertising email cross-promotions)

 Social Media Marketing

Once you have your content marketing and email marketing machine working flawlessly, you should then start adding social media marketing to the mix.  I’m not saying that you should ignore social media marketing up to this point.  What I’m saying is that your focus should not be on using social as a marketing channel until you’ve mastered content and email marketing.

Therefore, the best strategy to turn social media into a marketing channel is to start using it as a relationship building channel first.

It is much easier to build friends, followers and fans on social media when you aren’t selling.  So while you’re building your base with content and email marketing, don’t sell on social media and just connect with and help other people who are in your target audience.

That being said, when you are ready to turn on social as a marketing channel, below are the 4 techniques that you must use for optimal success:

1. Social Media Automation (tools like Buffer and Hootsuite)
2. Community Building (by leading groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and G+)
3. Social Search (using hashtags and keywords to find prospective customers to engage with)
4. Running Contest (to turn followers into email subscribers)
5. Twitter Cross Promotions (amplify your Twitter reach with the Nichevertising Twitter cross-promotions)

 Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the hardest strategy to implement out of all the ways you can market your product.  It also has the biggest pay-off.

There is anecdotal evidence all over the web from entrepreneurs who got their big pay day as a result of a link on an influencer’s blog or through an influencers public endorsement of their product. However, you should never bet your business plan on influencer marketing.

To get an idea on the level of commitment required,  I suggest you read this post that details how to influence the marketing influencers.  In addition to what’s shared in that post, here are the 4 techniques you must get really good at in order to market your product with influencer marketing:

1. RSS feeds (using Netvibes.com or Feedly to stay up to date all of the blog post from your target influencers)
2. Twitter lists (so you can segment the influential people in your twitter stream and quickly engage with them on a regular basis)
3. Commenting (well written comments on an influencer’s social media or blog post can put you on their radar if you are consistent.  It also helps if you’re always the first person to comment.)
4. Pitching/storytelling  (to get a influencer to cover your story, first you must build the relationship then you must have a great story to pitch that’s relevant to their audience.  Practice, practice, practice…)