As budgets become tighter, many small businesses look for lower-cost alternatives to the traditional marketing activities they have been using for years. But is that really a good idea? Well, in many cases it is a good idea AND can help even the smallest of budgets produce great results. What type of marketing can help a business do more with less and still get great results? Online marketing.

Often when budgets get tight, marketing is the first thing to be cut in order to save money and reduce costs. While that’s not typically a good strategy (especially in the long-term), it is nonetheless a reality for many small businesses today. So instead of cutting too deeply into the marketing budget, it can be helpful to simply switch out some of the older, more expensive methods of marketing to the newer, more cost effective e-marketing methods available today. For instance, sending email campaigns and e-newsletters typically costs less than a penny per recipient, which is far less than the cost of sending hard-copy marketing pieces through “snail mail.”

With online marketing, you can reach people through email, web sites, mobile phones, social networking, search engines, etc., which almost always costs less than older marketing methods (e.g., newspaper and magazine ads, yellow pages ads, direct mail pieces, print materials, etc.). In fact, some online marketing opportunities are very low-cost or completely free – such as some online directory listings, organic search engine results, and business profiles on social networking sites.

In addition to saving money, online marketing provides other benefits as well, including:

• Tracking and measuring – unlike print ads that may or may not be noticed by readers, most e-marketing activities can be tracked to see how many recipients viewed your message, which links they clicked on, how long they spent looking at your message, what time of day they viewed the message, and many more statistics depending on the type of e-marketing used. This makes it easy to determine the ROI on e-campaigns, since you can see and measure your results directly.
• Instant delivery – many types of e-campaigns can be instantly delivered to an email inbox, published to a web site, posted to a social networking profile, or uploaded to a video sharing site such as YouTube (in the case of videos).
• Multiple channels – e-marketing can be re-used on many different “channels” without much (if any) additional work on the part of you and/or your staff. For example, you can publish the same online coupon on your web site, send it as an email campaign, post it on a social networking site, use it as a web banner ad, etc.
• Viral potential – e-marketing has the potential to travel even further on the web as recipients share materials, forward emails, link to videos, re-post on blogs, and basically “spread the word” to their friends and contacts if they like what you have to say. All of this extra publicity, by the way, is typically free!

With traditional marketing materials like print ads or radio spots, there’s no direct way to track who saw (or heard) your offer, or who took action as a result of your message. Online marketing, on the other hand, provides you with specific tracking data that can show you the number of recipients who opened an email (or visited a web page), which links they clicked on, and if they “converted” by following whatever call to action you provided in your e-campaign. Few (if any) other marketing strategies can provide you with this level of detail to show you what worked, or to indicate what could be adjusted for future campaigns to improve your outcomes the next time.

E-marketing is an effective way to reach customers and potential customers, and can be a great addition to any small business marketing strategy. It is easy to do, measurable, and typically less expensive than the older marketing methods you may currently be using. By replacing some of your traditional marketing activities with lower-cost e-marketing initiatives, you can not only save your budget, but you may also improve your marketing results overall. During this time of shrinking budgets and assorted cutbacks, can you really afford NOT to try it?