Marketing is about convincing the consumer that a product, service, or brand is worth spending money on; it is about communicating an idea. This occurs in many forms, and strategies may include advertisements in print and other media, door-to-door campaigning, or celebrity endorsements – to name a few. However, this communication can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. Such as, say, a $5-million payout for a 30-second spot at Super Bowl. But since not every company or brand has the budget of a Coca-Cola or Bud Light, does this mean smaller outfits with less disposable cash are better off without a marketing strategy? Au contraire! There are any number of companies that have marketed themselves and their wares niftily, and on much smaller budgets, especially in the digital space. That too, through time-tested ‘in-the-box’ marketing strategies that are far from being out-of-the-box brainwaves. In other words, all they have done is stick to the trodden path to base their future plans on.

Let’s check out a few ‘old’ strategies that continue to offer returns.

Marketing Strategy 1. Reworking the landing page

The cheapest way to get known across segments – especially handy if one doesn’t have Coca-Cola’s marketing budget – is going online. Attractive websites lure new consumers, but an easily navigable landing page retains them.

The landing page can be specifically designed to suit the desired audience. It has one goal: increase conversion rate – or the percentage of visitors taking a desired action. Such an increase also means an increase in active clients, which translates into more revenue. Thus, a good landing page can be a key marketing pillar for a young company, as Uber has shown us.

Uber’s landing page is sleek, uncluttered, and not linked to the homepage, which means one can exit immediately. The five form fields do not ask too many personal questions, and the green CTA (call to action) button stands out. It is also a directional cue for visitors to press ahead: short and simple! The result: bookings (rides and food delivery) grew 41% YoY (year-on-year) to $12 billion in the US in the second quarter of 2018.

Marketing Strategy 2. Making websites relevant

There is a reason why websites have been continually evolving since the early 2000s; a simple task such as overhauling a website helps it stay current, adapt to trends, explore newer sales opportunities, and stimulate growth.

Even Walmart Inc, a Fortune Global 500 company with some 4700 brick-and-mortar stores in the US, upgraded its website to compete with Amazon. In 2016, it bought e-commerce startup Jet.com in a $3.3-billion deal that also involved engaging Jet founder Marc Lore as CEO of its online division in the US. One of the first things Lore did was to redesign the website and focus more on individual shoppers than become a digital super bazaar.

The goal was to “build a deeper emotional connection” with customers by creating a “more modern, digital shopping experience,” Lore was quoted by Business Insider magazine as saying. The design overhaul is expected to help Walmart push up online sales for fiscal 2019 by 40%.

Marketing Strategy 3. Old tricks on social media

Let’s face it: in this age of family groups on WhatsApp and interest groups on online platforms such as Facebook, social media has become a tool embraced by all age and income groups. Facebook has about 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube about 1.5 billion, WeChat almost 900 million, and Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat each has hundreds of millions of followers.

From a business point of view, social media can be a valuable tool for marketing strategists. General Electric (GE), another Fortune 500 company, realised this and resorted to video marketing on Facebook and YouTube in a big way. (Facebook averages 8 billion video views a day). GE also launched a content marketing campaign on Instagram, garnering 8 million views, without any paid advertisements.

In 2015, it also utilised Facebook to take the old advertising route – where manufacturers, distributors, and retailers pool in resources – to another level. But instead of asking the others to share costs, GE tied up with Promoboxx (a brand-to-retailer digital marketing platform) to lead the marketing campaign on Facebook. It was easy to identify which ad approach worked best, the company told trade magazine Adweek.

Marketing Strategy 4. New-age advertorials

A well-written promotional text, free of grammatical errors and made relevant with facts and data, can never go wrong with readers. If handled professionally, the results can be very satisfactory, as shown by the UK’s second largest health and beauty retailer Superdrug Stores, which saw revenues rising 2.3% to £1.2 billion last calendar year.

Superdrug married two marketing tools – ‘old age’ publishing placements and ‘new age’ social media – to promote its campaign through Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. As a result, the campaign enjoyed a million shares, attracted celebrity endorsements (including actress Sofia Vergara), and received 3 million views and coverage in The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Business Insider.