Cheap Marketing Channels

For a hustle to really take off, you need either a lot of dumb luck or an effective marketing strategy.

After all, if a tree falls down and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, yes it does, but you get our point.

The same principle applies to your business. Sure, you might have the best thing since sliced bread in your hands, but if nobody hears about it, who’s going to buy it?

If you are like me when I started, you might have a limited budget, and marketing can cost a lot. Luckily for us, there are a lot of great marketing channels out there that either won’t cost you much or are entirely free!

But cheap or free don’t come without downsides. I’ve tried pretty much every channel out there, and while you can achieve a lot of success, your mileage may vary. In order to get the most out of these channels, you have to put in the work.

That’s why this week we’ve brought you the research so you can choose the marketing channel that fits your hustle best.

This week we’ll be bringing you:

Trends. Want to know where to get the cheapest traffic by channel, platform, and industry? The research is here!
Strategies. We’ll go over the best marketing channel options you can use without having to spend a lot, including what makes them effective, their best use cases, and when they might be good for you.
Tool of the Week. When you work with multiple marketing channels, it can be hard to keep up. So this week we show you how Agorapulse can help you manage all your social media channels with ease.

But enough chit-chat. Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

Trends

There are literally hundreds of ways you can promote your side hustle, all of which have varying degrees of success depending on your budget, industry, skills, and numerous other intangibles. Paid advertising is the most measurable alternative when you’re just starting to grow, because it is supported by years of data that will aid in optimization.

While the following stats and trends aren’t exhaustive, they provide some interesting insights into the cost of advertising by channel, platform, and industry.

Online Vs Offline

Compared to direct mail, for example, which is highly specific and squarely focused on conversions, the cost of online advertising is as much as 50 times lower.

This makes online advertising extremely affordable and attractive for businesses of all sizes and stages of growth, including brand-new startups or one-person side hustles.

Cost Of Reach (Online Platforms)

The cheapest of the major platforms for reaching the widest possible audience, is the Google Display Network, which allows you to advertise on millions of websites and apps around the world, plus Google-owned properties, such as YouTube and Gmail.

Interestingly, the most expensive platform is also Google, namely Google Search. Why such a difference? The answer is: user intent.

Advertising on Google Search allows you to reach people while they search for specific goods or services. However, by advertising on the Display Network, you are trying to reach people who are not necessarily searching for your product.

Google Display (and social media advertising) is great if your objective is to raise brand awareness and for reaching your prospects in the earlier stages of your potential customers’ buying journey.

Cost Of Traffic (Online Platforms)

Unlike the cost of reach, which represents the dollar amount to get you in front of your target audience, the cost of traffic represents the dollar amount it costs you to get them to click on your ad. It is a function of the responsiveness of your audience and the cost of the platform you are using.

Twitter (X) comes on top, by a significant margin, when it comes to the cost of traffic. On average, it is 43% cheaper than the second cheapest platform (Google Display) and almost 14 times cheaper than the most expensive LinkedIn.

Strategies

Hard numbers are only a slice of the pie. To make the best of your marketing efforts you need to know which marketing channel works best for your hustle. So let’s see what we got.

What you need to know about cheap marketing channels

Going for a cheap marketing option will have its own drawbacks. Usually, what you save in costs you’ll lose in time or extra work.

With paid marketing options, you don’t really have to do much. All the work is done for you. Plus, ads and the like would be targeted specifically to the places where they would be most effective, presumably.

However, with free or low-cost marketing channels you’ll be the one doing the legwork, and for them to be effective that’ll be a lot of work.

Furthermore, some channels are more effective than others depending on what your business focus is. If you choose the wrong one, all your effort could be pointless. Yikes!

There’s a million platforms out there, and choosing the wrong one could set your hustle back instead of helping it.

How to choose the right marketing channel

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk business.

So when thinking about a marketing channel to choose, cheap, free, or paid, you first need to consider the following:

What are your marketing goals?

If you want to know if you made the right choice, you need to have specific goals for your marketing in mind. Otherwise, how will you track the success of your campaign? Consider your goals, and whether the market you want is the right fit for those goals.

What does your budget look like?

When we talk about budget, we are not only talking about money. You also need to consider your time budget. Choosing between free and paid tools is a balancing act of two budgets. Free tools tend to require more of your time and effort, while paid tools are more hands-off. So know how much time and money you can afford to invest before choosing an option.

Don’t go for a channel that’s cheap or free if you can’t take the time to use it effectively. And definitely don’t go for paid marketing if you can’t afford it.

Where is your audience?

A good hustler knows their audience, and that includes where they hang out. You wouldn’t go to a school to sell newspapers, would you? By choosing a channel that your audience already uses, you’ll cut your work by half.

What’s your competition doing?

Hey, there’s no shame in checking out what the other is doing. You can’t reinvent the wheel every day. See what strategies and marketing channels they are using and if there’s anything you can apply from them.

Working with influencers

Influencer marketing isn’t free, but it doesn’t need to break your bank account either. And when it works, boy does it pay off.

It’s quickly becoming a favorite of marketers, with 93% of them saying they’ve already used it. And it’s easy to see why people have been reported to prefer influencer-made content over branded posts.

So, what makes working with influencers a good choice? Let’s look at the perks:

Makes it easier to reach your audience

By choosing influencers that work in similar spaces as your business, you are assured that the people who would like your product will see it. Influencers build communities around specific niches, so if they match yours you’ll get a lot of interested eyeballs looking your way.

Build trust and credibility for your brand

People trust the opinions of influencers, that’s why they follow them. So when an influencer says they like a product or recommends it, their audience is likely to listen.

Gives you a wider reach

Working with influencers is a two-pronged approach. They can help you grow by connecting you with their audiences, and when their audience grows you naturally get more people coming your way.

Saves you time

Creating quality content to engage your audience takes a lot of time and effort, which influencers can help you reduce significantly.

Influencers do their research when posting, and so should you. Photo by Liza Summer from Pexels.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There are drawbacks to working with influencers. Here are the issues you could face:

Influencer Marketing can be pricey

The price of working with an influencer can vary a lot, especially depending on how big they are. Nano and Micro-influencers will run you around $10-$100 to $100-$500 respectively per post, but things quickly start climbing into the thousands when you get past 50,000 followers.

It can backfire and hurt your brand

The reason why it is so important to work with the right influencer is that the wrong one can do more harm than good. A problematic influencer could end up hurting the credibility of your brand, and the trust of your audience.

It’s hard to find the right one

Choosing the right influencer isn’t an easy task. You have to consider their niche, how they engage with their audience, and what their content is like. Though if you don’t have the time to research out, you could check out marketing platforms.

Using SEO or blogs to attract an audience

While Search Engine Optimization and Blogs are two different efforts when it comes to marketing channels, they have a lot of overlap in terms of what they want to achieve.

SEO is all about playing nice with search engines to get them to put your website high in search rankings, like Google. And that’s understandable, Google has 85% of the global search market. How can you do that? By showing engines like Google that your website has everything they need for a search query. And blogs are an excellent way to do that.

Through blogs, you can hit SEO metrics like keywords, content relevancy, quality, and structure. If you write blogs with SEO in mind, you can kill two birds with one stone. That’s why 72% of marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic.

Here are some perks of both:

SEO and Blogs delivers continuous traffic

The cool thing about SEO and blogs is that they keep on giving long after you are done with them. Whether you make your own content or buy it, it can continue to rank on its own and drive traffic to your site.

They turn you into an authority for your niche

Writing blogs shows your expertise on a given topic, while also providing your audience with a lot of useful information that isn’t directly selling them something. Plus, people tend to trust the results that show up on the first page of Google the most.

Both have a higher close rate than other forms of marketing

SEO leads to a much higher Click-Through Rate than paid advertising, and blogs are more enticing for people than your standard ad. This can lead to a close rate that’s as high as 14.6%, which is miles above the 1.7% email marketing gets.

SEO Marketing relies on reading trends and analytics.

And just like before, here are some downsides of both:

SEO and Blogging take time to show results

While SEO and Blogging can bring you great results in the long term, they are not great if you are looking for short-term results. You have to be in for the long haul.

Both can be time-consuming, and they never stop

With SEO, you have to always be on top of changes to the algorithm and how to optimize your website or previous content. With blogs, you have to keep posting so your efforts catch on.

77% of the US and 53% of the world have a social media profile, so that already tells you a lot about the kind of reach you have through social media marketing. Pew Research Center found that of the U.S. adults that use social media, their use breaks down in the following way:

YouTube: 73%
Facebook: 68%
Instagram: 35%
Pinterest: 29%
Snapchat: 27%
LinkedIn: 25%
X (Twitter): 24%

However, Social Media is not just choosing the channel with the most users. For instance, Instagram might be third here, but it’s very popular with certain niches. And while YouTube sits on top, not everything translates well to a YouTube channel format.

Why should you go with a Social Media Marketing channel? Let’s see some perks:

Provides tools to evaluate your performance

Social media platforms allow you to track a lot of data. Not only about your hustle, but about conversations and what’s trending. This can be incredibly useful to see how you are doing, and what you can use to make your marketing efforts more effective.

Reach specific niches

Social media is the perfect environment for tight-knit communities. You can find groups for just about anything there. As such, it’s much easier to reach the audience for your niche right where they gather.

You can combine it with paid ads

While this newsletter is mostly about cheap options, you can combine your own posting with paid ads to multiply the effectiveness of your efforts. It doesn’t need to set you back too much. Just get an ad every once in a while.

There are a lot of social media channels out there.

But the sword cuts both ways, and here are some ways in which social media marketing might not be for you:

Negative feedback and trolls

When you are on social media, you open yourself to the public. This can backfire VERY quickly. You need to be mindful of how the conversation is going and be careful with the things you post. Also, you’ll have to deal with trolls sooner or later, and they can be a pain.

Requires constant content and engagement

Social media platforms thrive on engagement, both yours and from your audience. In order for a social media channel to work organically as a marketing platform, you’ll have to post constantly. If you are not consistent in your efforts, your channel will not go anywhere. This can make these platforms terribly time-consuming.

Security concerns

With all the leaks surrounding Facebook, there’s growing concern about surrounding your data to social media platforms and how they use it. Let’s not forget that Instagram and Whatsapp belong to Facebook’s parent company as well (Meta). If you are iffy about surrendering your information, they might not be right for you.

Channel limitations

Whatever you post on social media, stays on social media. It doesn’t have the reach of SEO, where it can be found organically outside of the platform. Furthermore, people engage with different platforms in different ways, so the content you make for one might not work for another.

Tool of the Week

If you are using multiple marketing channels, which is common with social marketing, it can be hard to keep track of all the different messages and metrics you have to check, as well as the posting. That’s where a social media management tool like Agorapulse comes in. Agorapulse allows you to integrate several social media accounts in one hub, including Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.

Through their platform, you can manage comments, publish content, and check out reports simultaneously for all social media channels you’ve linked.

Also, they have a really useful resources section that is filled to the brim with guides on social media marketing, case studies, and even templates for you to use.