How Can We Succeed in Marketing Without Sufficient Funds and Resources

Nowadays, the costs of a marketing strategy do not necessarily guarantee its successful outcome. Therefore, economic investments on a determined campaign do not promise an effective boost in sales or customers’ satisfaction. Branding through enormous capital resources is no longer a transmission strategy that fits the current Internet era, neither can its practical results be tested.

【Part1】Why strong capital support is not synonym with satisfactory marketing result?
    
Subway advertising: it represents a very expensive marketing approach with no clear methods to track the results. For instance, advertisers are expected to invest considerable sums of money to place their products on billboards at every interchange station at Beijing subway. The relevance of the advertising space, and consequently its price, depends on the affluence of that particular interchange station and promotion channels feature vertical columns, wall posters, floor ads, and so on.

TV advertising: A 5-second ad on TV during spring festival season will come with an expensive price tag, but its effect is not that equal to its cost, due to the too short amount of time it has to influence consumers.

Microblog advertising: relatively affordable for a marketing campaign, the cost is about 200.000 for the full advertising package. This features a long article accompanied by photos and illustrations highlighting the promotional intentions in the end of the article. As a consequence, it is recognized that the outcomes of marketing strategy via microblogs are not particularly remarkable.

【Part 2】Internet era brought 3 unprecedented opportunities

(1)The advent of the Internet elevated the efficiency of information transmission to a whole new level, featuring free advertising based on word-of-mouth marketing.
(2)The cost of “being seen” is noticeably reduced and it leads to greater possibilities to downgrade the costs related to products’ promotion. 
(3)Everyone is able to establish a “trust-worthy” medium and therefore become a reliable source of information. Thanks to the Internet Info gap disappeared, and the generation of exclusive authoritative info platform is ended.

【Part 3】Practical steps to maximize marketing outcomes without investing too much

Below are four useful suggestions to be taken into consideration, in particular way the first three may be exceptionally valuable for your campaign.
 
(1) Locate key persons
It is a vital step and you should set related KPI for yourself in advance. This strategy will be extremely useful as long as you can handle at least two key persons each day.

(2) Use direct contacts motivated by their personal experience to be spokespersons 
We should especially be noted that many marketers have already made use of these core audiences, but still struggle to find a new channel to approach them, which is not recommended here. 

(3) Encourage sharing

Make sharing be an integrated part of your seeding.
It you share the content on social media platforms, you maximize the exposure and visibility of your product in real time as every user in your circle can read about it.

(4) Use hot events to expand the influence.

Assuming that you already cover a senior marketer position and have tens of thousands of loyal followers, you can continue to expand your brand influence by means of creating or making use of hot events, which is commonly believed to be an extremely powerful platform for social expansion and advertising. 
Here’s a summary of how to better manage event marketing. It mainly includes four steps:

(1) Identify the core difference and make sure you are advertising in a proper way.
(2) Generate materials offline and spread them online.
(3) Schemes or plans of campaigns, which can be reused, will, in most cases, improve the success rate.
(4) Consider a product related campaign as your first step to promote your brand.