While there are many ways to save money with your small business marketing, there are some costs that are inevitable. It’s impossible to market and grow your business without spending anything, whether that’s time or money. Effectively managing your marketing budget is not just reducing your spend in certain areas, it also involves maximizing the return on the amount that you do spend. Below are some tips for getting a higher return and better results on the marketing activities that you invest in.
Test Before You Spend
Typos can lose you subscribers, confusing messaging can divert customers, and misplaced data can let leads slip through the cracks. To make sure you get the greatest return on your paid marketing activities, test them whenever possible. For example:
- Before signing up for a new tool or service, use the free trial or request a demo. This can help you have a crystal clear picture of what you’re paying for, the amount of time you might need to invest, and any unexpected issues or costs that might arise.
- Before an email blast, send a test email—either to yourself or to others—to make sure it renders properly across devices and that all of your tracking works.
- Before running an ad, have someone else view your content to make sure your messaging produces the desired effect.
- You can even run A/B testing on a small segment of your audience, to see which words, colors, or call to actions will perform better.
Testing and trials before full execution can help you to avoid costly mistakes and your content to generate optimal results.
Target and Segment
Targeting your ideal audience is a marketing budget best practice that ensures you a greater return. Yet within that audience, there are subgroups based on their level of engagement with your business, demographics, and more. For some of your paid marketing strategies, you may want to further segment out your target audience. This enables you to get more specific with your content, be more effective with your messaging, and obtain more customers from your efforts.
Recycle and Repurpose Content
Producing quality content is a marketing must, no matter how much or how little you have to spend on marketing. However quality content requires time and money. Blogging may be free, but it takes time. Brochures and flyers might be quicker, but they have printing and paper costs. To get more out of the time and money you spend on your content, find ways to recycle and repurpose it. For example:
- Take an eBook and create smaller blog posts out of it, or vice versa.
- Turn slides from a powerpoint presentation into an infographic or social media posts.
- Print physical copies of blog posts or eBooks to hand out at trade shows or events.
- Repurpose the copy in your online advertisements for brief descriptions of those same offers in your product or resources page.
- Create a quick blog post containing a roundup of previously published posts related to one topic, and link to each one.
- Revise, update, and re-publish old blog posts when applicable.
Track and Measure Your Results
You should always track and measure the results of your marketing activities. This way you can invest more into what’s working, eliminate what’s not, or identify areas of improvement.
Adjust Budget Allocation
An effective marketing budget breaks down all of your marketing activities so you can identify the proper allocation of resources into each one. Keep in mind that optimal allocation may vary from month to month, depending upon seasonal trends.
For example, you may spend more on printed material in the summer than you do in digital advertising, because you use and benefit more from outdoor signage. Conversely, you might spend more on digital advertising in December, when ad rates tend to jump. To make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing spend, make sure you identify costs that fluctuate and adjust your allocation accordingly.
The goal of your marketing budget is to help you save and spend your marketing resources in the most effective way. Follow the above tips so you can both save money with your marketing, and maximize the returns on your spend.
