9 Ways Digital Marketing is Cost-Effective

Digital marketing helps businesses of all sizes make themselves more visible. However, considering how expensive it is to run a business, your comapny may be hesitant to spend extra funds without assurances. 

There are cost-effective strategies to use online to further legitimize and attract people to your business and its products or services.

Whether it’s through social media, a website, or other means, subtle digital marketing tactics can make a significant difference in your organization's marketability and profitability. 

1. Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads

Traffic goes beyond getting people to visit your website and making your business visible. For your company to succeed with a digital marketing campaign, you will need to generate targeted traffic.

Targeted traffic refers to website visitors who aren't just browsing your site, but are actively looking for products and information. It creates better conversion rates when you can attract targeted traffic to your website as they are more likely to purchase a product or engage services and ask questions. 

Good traffic is also needed for a more profitable return on investment. This way, your campaigns aren't attracting people who are simply surfing the web, but instead, your ads are reaching people who inquire about what yout brand sells, or they buy right away.

One way to direct 'quality' traffic is with retargeting ads. Retargeting is an essential audience-building mechanism. With set parameters about your preferred audience's online behaviors, interests, and demographic details, retargeting will place ads before those who would like to work with or buy from you. 

In addition, retargeting can even be used on people who have purchased on your website or app once. The ads serve as a reminder of or introduction to your value. Seeing how many conversions come through and where they come from can help you fine-tune future campaigns even more.

2. Social Selling Can Connect & Convert

Consumers are savvier and more informed than ever before. Because of social media's increasing influence, people use such channels to make intelligent buying decisions by researching products and making or reading recommendations. 

Of top salespeople, 62% attribute closing more deals to social selling. More effective social selling training sessions are needed to take advantage of essential touch points in the buyer's journey. With buyers spending more time researching, supplying them with the right help and tools while they’re looking for answers is crucial.

For social selling to work, you need a social media team that knows how to use social to connect with potential clients. Social media marketers need to monitor their profiles and provide value to prospects, engaging buyers on an ongoing, long-term basis.

Sharing meaningful, eye-catching content is the major key to making social selling work. By doing so, you establish connections with people and can play on that impact to enhance your sales efforts. Identify who you want to connect with and what platforms they use, and then plan your content for those targets. Create content that is engaging visually and provides a solution to the customer’s problem. With every helpful and positive touchpoint with a prospect, you are positioning your brand as an industry expert.

Businesses currently practicing social selling reported the following benefits: increased audience reach and the scope, contact with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey, increasing conversion rates, and improving sales efficiency. 

3.Track Success & Adjust Campaigns

Facebook conversion rate across industry

Using digital marketing methods, such as on social media, can help increase conversion rates in real time. The conversion rate is the percentage of viewers who are converted into leads and, soon enough, customers. 

Metrics and trackers such as return on investment (ROI), increment sales, returning visitors, and more are used to evaluate sales efficacy. These help you formulate your brand strategy, observe the issues that need to be addressed and create a more collaborative work environment as you improve.

Conversion rate and other metrics highlight weak spots within your marketing strategies. If you know an email was sent to a whole list of leads, but only a handful converted, you know something is amiss. When you see a campaign suffering, you can detect which touchpoints turned the customer off and adjust that landing page or email to be more appealing. 

Acknowledging and using key metrics enables you to allot resources to the marketing channels and tactics that are working. Tracking success also helps you to replicate it more readily in the future, so you connect with prospects sooner.

4. Yield a High Return on Investment (ROI)

With any business, return on investment is a crucial statistic used to evaluate profitability.

Since you can measure ROI easily by dividing your investment by sales, you don’t have to invest too much before you can evaluate how you want to proceed. To calculate it thoroughly, you need to be sure of what your business’s aims and goals are. 

Figure out your budget, the sales you need to make, and what you want to get from your digital marketing campaign before measuring your return on investment. You need Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to get an accurate measurement.

KPIs include general performance indicators such as traffic, leads, and reach as well as channel-based indicators (social networks, search engines, blogs, and so on). KPIs also include source-based performance (organic search, direct traffic, referrals), campaign-based performance (including conversion rates) and setting realistic goals. 

Once a campaign has run long enough to gather data, get performance reports and calculate the ROI. You need to foster a collaborative environment between your sales and marketing specialists to track and improve ROI.

Digital marketing is cost-effective for business because you can continually evaluate how and if it is working. Measuring the ROI from your campaigns helps you to re-work strategies and put the resources toward the right projects. 

5. Pay-Per-Click Gets to an Audience Sooner


If you’re running a business, especially a small one, pay-per-click advertising is a must. Around 45% of small businesses use PPC advertising as part of their digital marketing strategy. Your marketing budget isn’t expansive, so every dollar should be maximized.

You can develop greater brand awareness and get instant visibility to a relevant audience, something search engine optimization (SEO) might take months to achieve. 

In contrast, PPC allows you to leverage your best assets to generate leads. Ads contain a value proposition (usually in the headline and meta-tag) that your target audience of online searchers and website browsers will find relevant. 

Be wise about the keywords and phrases bidded on and used, adjusting your choices slightly might not affect the volume of clicks, but it might leave more room in your budget. Strategically change things up and see where you can settle on getting the best ROI.

Using premium search techniques, PPC generates a high return on investment and allows you to limit expenditures to convert customers. 

6. Customer Acquisition Costs

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) can be a make-or-break metric. 

The CAC includes variable and fixed costs that go into converting new customers. It can even be calculated on an individual account basis to determine the resources it would take to bring on this new client. Calculating this figure for a campaign requires you to divide the total spend on customer acquisition by total new customers. 

So, if $100 is spent on marketing in a year, yet acquired 100 new customers, the customer acquisition cost would be $1. These costs matter to your company and any potential investors. So, to make profitable and effective decisions, your business needs to know the average costs.

With digital marketing, a lot of your costs are low. Things like email campaigns, social media interactions and posts, and website content cost you nearly nothing to produce. When your customers come to you through these channels, your CAC is negligible. 

7. Low-Cost Content and Customer Engagement

Low-Cost Content and Customer Engagement

If you don't have a big budget or you spent a lot of money on a particular aspect of a campaign, you can still advertise successfully. Use your social media to drive attention to your business by creating a series of posts that are on a trending topic and relate to your campaign or brand. This can help generate traffic from unexpected sources but from an audience that is still relevant.

Leverage your data to shape your marketing plan. Focus on what your current customers like about your company, including the emails you send, the content you share, or the promotions you do. 

It’s valuable to use your analytics to gain valuable insight. And every once in a while, send out a survey to connect with and get feedback from customers. These tactics allow for honest feedback and enhanced information that numbers can convey.

Using more cost-effective strategies and interacting with your customers consistently, allows you to connect with new customers in a meaningful way. While creating a better foundation with leads means it'll be much easier for sales and marketing to move them through the funnel.

8. Brand Awareness on a Budget

Digital marketing experts increase brand awareness through the simplest means without exerting too much spending power.

Email marketing is an inexpensive and very effective digital strategy. Compared to other digital tactics, eMarketer reports that email can generate four times the ROI. For that reason, it’s the go-to strategy for most businesses. 

It costs little to nothing to run an email marketing campaign with user-friendly email management tools such as Marketo and MailChimp. All that's needed is persuasive text from the subject line to the body, a timeline that fits with marketing goals, an enticing call-to-action, and a great landing page.

When you have the writers and designers in-house who can produce those materials, you’re set. If not, outsource copywriting and design to make emails and landing pages more appealing on a limited budget. If you work with an agency, they can set you up with great resources.

Social media marketing, whether through organic posts or cost-efficient ads like influencers, can get you the attention you need. Take advantage of trending topics, hashtags, community groups, and influencers who fit in with the image you have created. With so many channels out there, building brand awareness doesn't have to bust the bank.

9. Take Advantage of Social Media Influencing

Partnering with social media influencers is becoming a trendy way for enterprises and small businesses to increase outreach. 

If your business is in retail, this is especially useful, whether you’re selling jewelry, accessories or any other fashion-related products. If you’re a large retail brand, you could offer a higher price item in exchange for a sponsored post by a notable influencer. Though you have to pay a sum upfront, influencers have loyal followings that trust their recommendations. So, the right partner can position your products perfectly for a spike in sales.

Tools such as Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex are helpful in identifying the biggest social influencers across the major social networks. Most influencers can be found on Instagram, ranging from fashion to the music industry, as well as sports and other fields. You can also see how they fit with your industry and target audience. BuzzSumo can point out those who write and present similar topics of interest, allowing you to carve out an ideal target market.

Don't be afraid to contact influencers. This is what they do. Tag them on social media posts if it's something the influencer can relate to and ask them for a share. Striking up a good bond with such people in the social media industry will make your business and its services more enticing to a wider scope of people.

These 9 tactics show the cost benefits of digital marketing across a range of functions in a business. The key to using them is to have the right talent in-house that can capitalize on the opportunities. 

Find out how to easy it is upskill your workforce across departments in digital marketing and social selling

Clodagh O'Brien
Senior Content Specialist