How to Scale Your Business and Keep Marketing Costs Low | 93

If you’re not careful, growing and scaling your business can drain your bank account. If you have a serious case of shiny object syndrome, then you might get swept up in purchasing every course, running ads, and more to try to scale your business. But it’s 100% possible to grow with low-cost marketing (in fact, I think it’s exactly where you should start).

What is “low-cost marketing”?

When I talk about marketing on a budget, I’m really talking about beefing up your holistic marketing plan. There is a common saying out there that is, “takes money to make money.” And yeah, that’s true! But there are tried and true ways to market your business and have a well-rounded marketing plan - without breaking the bank

Here are three low-cost marketing strategies that will help you scale and grow -

Strategy #1: Content Marketing

You’ve probably heard that you need to have some type of long-form marketing strategy. These are pieces of content that are searchable and have a long shelf life. This includes things like blogging, YouTube, and podcasting.

Instagram Lives, Reels, and TikTok can also go in this category, but know that they have a much shorter shelf life and are not as searchable. So, I wouldn’t rely completely on these platforms. 

This is a low cost marketing strategy because most content marketing is free or very affordable. You can pay for Instagram or Facebook ads to run to your content (often called nurture or brand awareness ads), but it's not necessary. You can rely on good SEO to drive traffic. 

Strategy #2: Email Marketing

Email marketing has a ton of opportunities and potential in low cost marketing. With email marketing, you are working on growing your email list, nurturing your audience, and also selling to your list.

You can organically grow your email list by posting on social media and including landing pages in your content marketing (in a blog, show notes, etc.). You can definitely use paid advertising to attract people to your email list and grow, but it’s not required. Lastly, you can grow your email list through collaboration. You can appear on a podcast or join a summit and share a lead magnet with a new audience.

To get the most out of your email marketing, you want to have a plan in place for consistently emailing, nurturing, and providing for your subscribers after they join your list.

Strategy #3: Community Builders

With this type of marketing, you are focusing on nurturing your audience and building the know, like, trust factor. You can build this community through Instagram, a Facebook group, TikTok, and more. I tend to favor groups over social media because there is collaboration between members as well.

There are a few low cost marketing strategies to build your community. First, get your name out there on social media. Organically grow and build a following on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Collaboration is also a great way to grow. Promote your community or social page on a podcast or live call. You caaaaan pay to join giveaways, run ads to your groups, and more - but honestly, I really don’t recommend this. 

Looking for more?

I talk a lot more about holistic marketing strategies in Episode 82 Three Phases of Marketing Mastery and Episode 44 A Holistic Approach to Your Marketing Strategy.

Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!

xo, Jenzaia 

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Episode Transcript:

Hey there, I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Growth, a podcast created for ambitious teacher entrepreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, and flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.

Okay, so before we hop into the episode, I just wanna remind you to download my free guide to Facebook Targeting Audiences. It has been created specifically for teacher business owners, and I go through the warm, lookalike, and cold interest-based audiences that you need to have set up to be running Facebook and Instagram.

There are checklists and brainstorming pages so that you know you have everything. But as an exciting special, I'm opening up some audience audit calls where you can hop onto a 15-minute zoom call with me, and you'll get my eyes on your audiences so that you can make sure not only you have all of the audiences, but they are truly perfect for your business. So head to marketscalegrow.com/audienceaudit to book your free audience audit Call today. Okay, now into the episode.

Hello and welcome back to Market Scale, Grow my name’s Jenzaia and this is a Saturday strategy session. How to scale your business. Tons of money. This is one of these questions that I get all the time, and so I thought I should address it honestly.

It really just comes back to something I talk about all the time, and that is your holistic marketing strategy and how you implement all of the different pieces of your marketing. To consistently, and strategically grow your business. So let's dive into exactly what the three prongs of your holistic marketing strategy are, and then how you can implement them with or without a budget, and what some of those different options are for each one.

Number one is your content marketing. This is your podcast, your blog, or video content, and you can do whichever one you choose, but it should be something that is searchable. So blogs, you can be using SEO search engine optimization to make sure that Google is picking it up consistently. Blogging is super important, and then you're gonna be wanting to promote.

If you choose a podcast, then you're gonna need to have show notes that go with the podcast, because currently, podcasts by themselves are not highly searchable. But if you create a blog post, then that becomes more searchable and will help you grow that piece of your business and to grow through your content.

And the final one is video content. Whether you choose to do YouTube or IG Lives or Facebook Lives, whatever it might be, there will be some differences. So for example, YouTube is a search engine, so YouTube is highly searchable. So if that is what you're choosing to do, then you. The searchability is built in.

But if you're choosing to do IG Lives or Facebook Live, there is definitely less searchability and the lifespan of that content will be shorter. Video content though is one of my favorites because people get to see your face, they get to hear your voice, then they build a relationship, and one time I even heard that we've been trained to trust the people we see on the video, like news reporters, what we see. So documentaries too would be another great example. And so there's this built-in trust that people are going to build with you immediately. When they see you on video and then podcasting, just to go back a little bit, podcasting is great because they can hear your voice and there's this intimacy, and then people are gonna have you in their pocket, in their earbuds while they're doing everyday tasks.

And so you become a. A part of their everyday life. And there are times when I'm walking down a trail and I will be instantly brought back to a podcast that I was listening to at that moment. And those lessons that I learned and the information that I retained from that podcast will come back to me. And so if you are that person that people are listening to, whether they're doing those tasks, you're.

You're building up those relationships, building up that intimacy, building up that connection that you need to get people into your audience to buy in and to build the long-term relationships that we're aiming for. Only you can really decide which one is best for your business. And I've chosen podcasting.

I love podcasting. There is a little bit of tech to it, more than blogging for sure, but it was something I was willing to master. YouTube. I just felt like I needed a pretty background and I needed my makeup done and, and, and it was just a little bit too much. I have, and I will be continuing to include more live videos.

Facebook Lives, Instagram Lives, for example, and I think that those are really great brand builders as well because people get to see you and they hear you and there's less tech involved. There's no editing really, and. It's so much more casual that I just don't feel like I need that pretty perfect background.

And so that's kind of how I use the three. I have the podcast as my main form and I have blog show notes that go with it. So that's a blog on my website. And then for video content, I do shorter video pieces live, that will live on in the Facebook group and on my Instagram. Typically, those ones only live for about 24 hours, but they can be downloaded and they can live for longer if they're posted onto the feed.

Now, marketing, there are three different types of marketing that you can do. There is organic marketing, paid marketing, and then collaboration, marketing, and collaborative marketing. I'm not really sure what the technical term would be there. So organic marketing is posting on your social media. It is Anything that you're doing.

That you're not paying for. And so TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, all of those could be considered organic marketing. You're not paying. You're just posting and you're getting the word out there. Pinterest is a great one because the lifespan of a pin is extremely long. I think that Instagram and TikTok can be really great as well.

The lifespan is shorter for sure on Instagram, especially TikTok. A good tip talk, a good TikTok video can last up to three or four months, so just remember that TikTok does have a longer lifespan than Instagram. If you do, And then Facebook. It really is hit or miss. It depends on your niche, depends on your audience.

Are people even actually still on Facebook in your market? You have to think about that. But those are all places where you can promote your long form content organically. They also all have a paid option. There are Pinterest promoted pins, there are Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and TikTok ads. You can do Google ads or YouTube ads.

So they all have paid. You can promote your content with paid ads, so you are specifically paying to drive more traffic to that blog post, to drive more traffic, to listen to your podcast, to drive more traffic, to watch the video, and that is a really great way to expand your audience and to get more people consuming your content.

More people will be nurtured by your content and therefore going through your sales. Collaboration might be my favorite option, but it doesn't necessarily work for content marketing. Now, collaboration is where you are using someone else's audience, whether that is going live together on Instagram or if it is, um, being part of a summit or a conference, or if it's being a guest on someone's podcast, typically you wouldn't be promoting your long-form content. 

Like you might say, I have a blog, or I have a podcast. Go check it out. But I typically wouldn't think of collaborations as a great way to be growing your audience for your long form content. We'll talk about a better way to use collaborations in just a second. Content marketing is definitely the first place that I would start because you can start for low cost and there's a low barrier to.

And so it's a really great way to start building up a bank of resources that people can turn to. And just to get you, you started in your business. And without a budget, without a large marketing budget, using that content is a really great way to just get started and to start figuring things out, promoting it organically, and potentially maybe dipping your toes into some paid advertisements as well.

Prong Number two is your email marketing. And so this is your weekly emails that you're sending out to your email list. I also include in here growing that email list, so promoting your free opt-ins, whether that's a checklist, an ebook, whatever it might be that you have, or even could be free master classes, um, a free summit, or even a paid summit.

Whatever you're doing to grow your email list also falls in here. This is super, super important. I do not come up with fresh content every week. My emails that go out are based on my podcast, and the goal is to get people to listen to my podcast. Now, sometimes I do add more content and I am trying. to get some additional content being sent out to people who are on my waitlist to join Dream List Essentials.

I love the idea of having a waitlist strategy where you're emailing special content out to your wait list, so I'm working on that behind the scenes, trying to figure out exactly how to do it, but that is part of my email marketing strategy. There's also definitely the ability to sell to people on, or like through your email.

And that needs to be taken into consideration. Now when you're trying to grow your email list, grow your email marketing strategy. The first way to do it again is organically, and this would be posting your lead magnet or your free classes posting about it on social media, similar to how I mentioned posting your long-form content on social media.

You can post links to your opt-ins on Facebook. When they allow promotion on your Instagram, you can share about it on Pinterest. You can do pins that direct people back to your opt-in page. You can also share opt-ins in your long-form content. So if you have a blog, a lot of people will put the form to opt into the email list at the bottom of that blog post, which is a great idea.

Or even having pop. . The second way is through paid promotion. Again, you can use paid promotion on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook. My favorites for growing your email list are definitely promoted pins and Facebook or Instagram ads, just because of the nature of how they work. I think that it's a really great strategy.

So you would be driving traffic to your Optin page and wanting people to convert onto your email list. This is what my Facebook ad sprints do. If you're interested in setting up a list-building ad, you should definitely check out my Facebook ad sprints. Um, we set up that list-building ad, we grow your email list and we really work on it.

on getting it to a point where it's converting well for you. So Facebook ads, and sprints if you're looking for paid Facebook and Instagram ads to grow your email list. The third way is collaborations, and I love using collaborations for this specifically. So if you are a guest expert on a podcast, if you go live with someone, if you're part of a conference or a summit, I highly recommend that you promote a free opt.

You are gonna be using that person's audience or sometimes multiple people's audiences because in a conference or a summit, everybody is gonna be promoting this event. And so you're getting in a ton of people from a ton of different places. And so it's really great to promote your free opt-in whenever you are part of a collaboration, and then you are getting to take advantage of that person's audience to grow your own email.

One of my favorite ways to use collaborations.

And that's where the real community comes out, is where people are not just interacting with you, but also the rest of the people. But I do consider growing your Instagram and your TikTok as community builders, and they're a great way to get people to. Get to know you better and to like you and trust you more, which is the main purpose of your community.

And so whether you've chosen Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok or two of them, or maybe even all three of them, if you, you're going crazy. Um, it's really important that your goal on that platform is to really be nurturing relationships and to get people to know you better. And to really further tho that, that trust that connection.

You can grow all of these again organically through paid and through collaborations. So let's talk about each one organically. You can promote your different social media platforms. On each other or through your email list and through your long-form content. So typically at the end of a podcast, I'll say something like, If you like this episode, take a screenshot and share it.

Tag me, I'm at Hey, at She, which is helping take my podcast listeners and bring them over to Instagram In my emails, sometimes I will also say, Come check me out on Instagram. I'm @heyitsjenzaia, whatever it might. And then sometimes on Instagram, I will promote my Facebook group and say, Hey, go join the Facebook group.

It's over here, uh, through email. I will sometimes promote my ins, and my Facebook group as well. And so through those different pieces, I'm organically promoting my different communities. Now I do have a TikTok account as well, that's newer. Don't really promote it yet. We'll see where that goes, but that's how I'm organically promoting my social media is growing my community through paid advertisements. I don't typically recommend buying followers or buying people into your community, or your Facebook group, and, but it is something you can do. You can run a Facebook ad that says, Join a group of like-minded people and then they're directed to a landing page, and that landing page.

Let's click here to join the group, and then they're transferred back to the group—definitely something you can do. You can participate in giveaways on Instagram where people have to, like all of the people, be a part of the giveaway, and that will grow your following. Now again, I don't really recommend paying to grow your following.

It's really a vanity metric. And so it's better to grow it organically over time with people who really wanna be in your community, really wanna be following you on different platforms. The final way I also really like this one is using collaborations. So, Going live with someone on Facebook or Instagram, naturally, you're gonna be pulling in your audience and theirs.

And so you will likely get people from their audience who start to follow you and they'll get people from your audience following them. So a collaboration works for both people to grow that community. You can also, um, participate in a conference or a. Which will help grow your following, and grow your community.

If you wanted to do something like a week of live events, I've done this before where people are invited into someone else's Facebook group or you invite people into your Facebook group. to present live, and then those presenters will also invite their followers to join the Facebook group so that they can see the presentation, and then your Facebook group or your community is going to grow.

So collaboration is a great way because if you select your collaboration partners effectively, then they will have a similar audience to you, and then you are able to. Use their audience to grow your audience. And so I do typically recommend that you are picking like a sister audience for this collaboration.

For example, for me, having somebody who does Pinterest or, um, email marketing is great, especially if they specialize in Pinterest marketing for teachers or email marketing for teachers. That's amazing for me cuz my specialty is Facebook ads for teachers. I probably don't. Like, piggyback or do a collaboration with someone who's also doing Facebook ads for teachers.

There's just a little bit too much overlap, and a little bit too much potential for a clash. However, I do also believe strongly in collaboration over competition and community over competition. So if you're going about it the right way with an open, um, heart. Community, community, and collaboration, then, um, having those like identical niches may not be a problem.

Okay, So if you don't have a large marketing budget, then those are my recommendations for you. You absolutely can grow your business, grow your content, and your audience. Consuming your content, growing your email list, and growing your community without paying for ads of any kind. And then once your business continues to grow and you're having more success, you can slowly tiptoe into a paid advertisement in the different ways I mentioned in this podcast.

So remember, content marketing, email marketing, and community. Those three are gonna give you a holistic approach to marketing. You're gonna grow your business strategically. It's gonna be stronger if you are doing them all. But, but, and this is a huge caveat that I probably should have put in earlier, but don't try to do all of them all at once.

Pick one to start with. Well, I picked the content marketing layer in the next one. My second one was email marketing, and then layer in the last one for me, it was community building. Once you have the systems in place so that you are successfully doing each of these different phases, these layers successfully, before you start doing the next one, you wanna be having success in the first, before you layer in another one.

Okay? Like I said earlier, if you enjoyed this episode and you got some value from it, you want other people to listen and get value from it as well. Screenshot. Share in your Instagram stories and tag me. I'm at, Hey, it's Genia and I will be back in your ear next week with another strategy session.

Thank you so much for listening to Market Scale Grow. If you're ready to build your email list and generate consistent leads on autopilot, then we would love to partner with you. Our growth package is perfect for course creators. Service riders and coaches look to inject their list with fresh leads so that they can amplify their amazing program and get it out to new people.

This six-week package is perfect for you. If you have a proven lead magnet that you're ready to turn into an established lead generation machine to get started today. Head to marketscalegrow.com/worktogether, fill out the application and someone from my team will be in contact with you to schedule a free strategy session to ensure that it's a good fit and to get you on the path to consistent lead generation with Team JD.

Thank you again for listening, and I look forward to working with you.