Turn digital pennies into business pounds

In this economic climate, every hour and pound invested in marketing has to be justified. Smart use of digital is compelling for any marketer. It needn’t be expensive, and if your digital spend is mostly going on, say, technology or consultancy, your focus may need to change. 

Make use of free (or virtually free), open, flexible and easy to integrate solutions that require little or no IT dependence.

In this post, Aquduct gives insight into 10 high-value initiatives marketers can try with digital - that won’t cost the earth.

1. Get your customers to work for you – use your website for “crowdsourcing”. Get your customers to contribute to product development (such as New Look), technical support (such as Apple) or other parts of your operations.
2. Retain and share your internal knowledge – make tacit knowledge work harder. Don’t rely on just one person to know about something in your organisation. Create a free hosted wiki (with PBwiki for example) or ask your IT team to add an open source wiki (such as Twiki) on your own network.
3. Make it easy to update your website without relying on IT – use an open source (such as MySource Matrix) or even hosted Content Management System (such as Wordpress) with the rich features you want, whether blogs, forums or workflow.
4. Scale your web hosting to what you actually use – many companies pay for more hosting than they need, or aren’t making the most of online-served applications. Consider scalable hosting solutions from “cloud” services offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
   
5. Add free “widgets” to your website – these are free bits of code you can add to your website; everything from Google Analytics to stock price feeds and bookmark sharing links.
   
6. Use more multimedia – video is now very economical to create and share online. Services such as YouTube and Vimeo allow you to embed quality video on your website without the headache and cost of hosting.
7. Have a presence on other websites – not all your prospects will even get to your website. Be where they are – it’s easy and free to create a group in Facebook, respond to relevant blogs or bookmark your top pages on Digg or StumbleUpon.
8. Build a community on your website – if Facebook and MySpace don’t suit your needs, create your own social network with free hosted tools such as Ning.
9. Get a branded, unique presence on all things digital – use products such as Umee to establish a rich branded presence on social networks, create your own widget for others to use, or build bespoke applications on the iPhone, Google phone or Facebook.
10. Conduct live testing on your website – use Google’s Website Optimiser to run tests of tweaks to key pages on your website, see the results and act on them.