It has become standard for small businesses to develop content marketing strategies as a way of acquiring and maintaining customers. Alas, most small businesses and startups are low on funds and may not be able to invest heavily into content marketing. 

The good news is that effective content marketing does not necessarily have to cost much. The truth, however, is that if you want to engage in PR for a cheaper price, there are numerous low-cost and no-cost PR strategies you can take advantage of. In this article, we try to identify at least seven effective but cheap content marketing tactics that are worth considering today.

Strategy #1: Guest Blogging

One of the most effective strategies to publicize a blog and attract new readers to a blog is to write a blog post on other relevant blogs and websites. Finding blog sites that attract your target customer demographic and delivering relevant, fresh guest articles is a cost effective and effective strategy offering valuable link building, referral traffic and new followers.  

The moment you are writing a guest post, it is important not to be a direct seller but to offer solutions that incorporate your products. Ensures that the keywords and links back to your site, where possible, are incorporated in the beginners’ forum. Approach site owners and bloggers for the contribution prospect and the policies required for the same. Guest blogging can go a long way to expanding the content that your brand or business is associated with, with little time invested.

Strategy #2: Update and repurpose already existing content

Mobile devices- Before writing new content, cascade what you already have. Are there any old materials that can be repurposed, or in other words, updated and adapted for new blog posts, graphics, or downloads? Reusable items are more economical than having distinct ones made for a specific use. 

For instance, you can turn a large whitepaper into a 3-article series with links to each of the other two articles, in between the article and the link, providing a brief description of the content of the rest of the article. Could I transform a set of social media posts into a real guide? Take an ebook and divide it into several smaller segments of how-to articles. Build content extensions to broaden the interest of your followers and create new inventions and utilities for your target audience. Reusing content in a new form continues to cost little while improving its value.  

Strategy #3: The fourth category combines the experiences of using user-generated and curated content

UGC involves using your audiences and fans to create promotional content. Some familiar UGC strategies are utilizing customer images and comments, encouraging reviews and chatter, and running photo or video contests.

Apart from UGC, another expense-saving strategy is to gather appropriate third-party content. Reposting about industry events, sharing helpful links, and giving your opinion on what’s popular now are valuable content for your followers. Attribution and context take ordinary curation to a completely different level of content.  

UGC and curation add your audience to your content marketing team. The cost incurred is very small and you are able to get extra increased variety and audience engagement without substantial creation burdens on your internal team.

Strategy #4: Update And Sell Old Material 

What about that content that may have been created a long time ago or little-used content lying idly in your database? Repurpose content by utilizing on-page SEO enhancements, social media reposting, turning into newsletters, and occasionally paid content promotion. Prospect for new site traffic and subscribers by archiving content to the site surface. 

Add new introductions to already published blog entries, videos, and resources that tie them to modern occurrences and search queries. Update the page titles, meta descriptions, headers, images and internal linking for the site to be easily found by the search engine crawlers. Encourage repackaged old content in your social platforms maybe under a tag of a short time sale or other related wares. That’s why the small upfront effort provides already existing material with an instant traffic and conversion lift.

Strategy #5: Interview Industry Experts

Expert interviews provides target audiences with valuable insiders’ view in simple question and answer format. And performing interviews provides less content generation hurdles than creation guides and essays on your own. 

Find those figures and experts targeted at your audience and explain how providing them with educational interviews could be helpful. Utilize the transcripts for blog articles or as an article series reply, split audio into an episode of a pod, and share quotes as a post on social media. Promoting expands the type of content you’re creating, as well as puts a focus on other appreciated voices. Interviewees also support you by promoting your content and brand in their interviews. 

Strategy #6: Live Video Broadcasting

Live video is one of the most popular content marketing trends since such content has one-way streaming across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and others. Sharing live events or even a simple talk show only demands a phone and a stand. Yet it commands strong viewer engagement because it is a snap of the moment and comes and goes and does not require a plot arc.

Experience real-time streaming to introduce and demonstrate company values, explain various procedures and organizational patterns, answer questions, report events or incidents, and much more. The improvised nature of this brings a real feel to today’s consumer. Moreover, saved archived video means you can separate multi-camera sets into ‘flipping’ parts from one live session, providing extra value.  

Though video production could easily compound into a Herculean task as well as with high costs, live streaming per se represents a fairly simple and cheap entry portal to visual content. You immediately increase brand touchpoints and characterization for little capital outlay or significant investment. 

Strategy #7: Grow An Email List

A recent DMA study shows that Email marketing is the most effective in achieving the highest ROI for marketers across digital media, with every dollar invested yielding $44 in overall sales. However, only 21% of small organizations employ email marketing. Creating a base of active subscribers to whom you can promote your current content hiking dramatically has tremendous value and minimal expenses, if any, beyond the costs of your email marketing company. 

Have a strong lead magnet such as an ebook, toolkit or template that a website visitor cannot resist providing an email address for. Another way to promote your signup form is with pop-ups, headers, website widgets, and even in your blog posts. To increase subscription the process of subscribing must be quick and easy. 

Continually engage those who subscribed by communicating new blog notification, special contents, exclusive promotion, recommendation based on their interest and other update. Do not forget to have subscription offers visible in every content that you are promoting in the internet. A growing email list is an owned audience that can be directly reached for cheap at any given time.        

Conclusion

Nobody ever said that you cannot do proper content marketing just because you are working within a tight budget. These seven strategies show that regardless of size and resources, companies can aggressively popularize and engage customers with brands more than money. Reusing prior work, crowdsourcing UGC, reaching out to subject matter experts, live streaming video, and leveraging email subscribers are easily executable strategies that can facilitate the best results with the least expenses required.

Breaking free from budget limitations is a matter of engaging in trial and error to find out what works best to appeal to your target audience. Approach the testing of radical content material and cheap distribution platforms as an opportunity. That is why the content marketing outcomes of these cost-effective bets with a well-planned editorial calendar and measurement regimen are frequently exceeded. Marketing that matters, be it budgeted or not, thus relies on the following: Basically, marketing goals, whether budgeted or not, should aim at creating value and relevance as much as possible.