When it comes to marketing, you can reach more customers with the more money that you have to spend. Because of this, your bottom line can be directly affected by how efficiently you manage your marketing budget.
Keeping costs on less important aspects of your marketing strategy low and the ones that yield results high is crucial. We’ll introduce you to five key methods to controlling your marketing budget and getting the most out of it.
1. Form Strategic Business Partnerships
Co-op marketing and strategic business partnerships are an effective way to increase the mileage you get from your marketing efforts. Working with businesses that are also attempting to reach your target demographic can help you reach a larger number of potential customers.
If an airliner were to reach out to a chain of hotels, they could have a synergistic relationship reaching customers planning flights and overnight stays. In this example, working together to promote both businesses would benefit each without direct competition.
2. Don’t Overspend on Outside Talent
You won’t always have the right member on your team for everything that needs to be done. When that time comes, it’s important to hire to right person for the right job.
It’s also equally important to keep in mind the right person for scope of the job. It’s not always important to hire the foremost expert when the scope of your project is local versus national. Keeping your budget and goals in mind during hiring outside talent is a large part of keeping your spending in line.
3. Repurpose Content in Your Online Strategy
If you’re at all overlooking your online marketing strategy, now is the time to give it its due focus. For many businesses, their website and social media presence is equal to their lifeblood. To strengthen your online efforts, you can take existing content and reuse it.
Press releases and ad copy can be cataloged, keyword optimized and published on your website. That content can then be used for social media promotions and to gain visitors from SEO. In this way, everything that you create is working twice for your business.
4. Reuse Advertising Content in Other Ways
Not every ad revision and draft makes it into circulation. Chances are you have more than a few recently rejected ideas that can be reused in other ways.
You can use ad imagery and copy for your annual report, or even go as far as to use a scrapped idea for another campaign with some slight tweaking. Time is money in business, and the same is definitely true when it comes to marketing.
5. Do as Much Inhouse as Possible
You yourself are the key ingredient to your marketing strategy’s success or failure. If it makes sense, doing some tasks yourself can save both time and money.
Tweaking website copy, publishing press releases, or doing A/B split testing of landing pages are all made simple with tools online. Anything that doesn’t come natural can then be outsourced to a virtual assistant.
Small businesses especially need to keep tabs on all aspects of their marketing budgets. Reaching as many customers as possible is crucial when achieving growth and business goals. In the never ending struggle to keep your business working smoothly, having a good sense of what works and what doesn’t can make all the difference.
Author:
Nick Rojas is a self-taught, serial entrepreneur who’s enjoyed working with and consulting for startups. He concentrates on teaching small and medium-sized enterprises how best to manage their social media marketing and define their branding objectives. You can follow him on twitter as @NickARojas
