How to Maximize Your Marketing Budget

Hooray! 

It’s the start of a New Year and for many the start of a nice, fresh marketing budget.  A new budget can be a different experience for all of us.  Some of us may feel relieved that we now have a new influx of funds to initiate all the many campaigns and ideas we have in mind.  Others may start the year immediately feeling crunched, trying to still figure out how to stretch those funds all year long.  Well, whichever side you’re on, our goal is to show you how to maximize your marketing budget.

Leverage Similarities between Strategies

Stretch your dollars by distributing your funds across complementary strategies.  If you are planning on investing on a new website, then it will make sense to invest in email marketing to drive visitors to your site.  If you are planning to improve your overall SEO, then also plan on investing in the development of your content marketing.  By ensuring your funds are distributed hand in hand with complementary strategies, you will find that your overall return and engagement will be greater.

Adopt a targeted approach

Many times we get wrapped up in trying to get the “word out,”  and that will drive us to send communications and campaigns to as many people as we can.  But in today’s age of over-communication, consumers and businesses are saturated with too much information.  Instead, focus on a targeted approach.  For example, perhaps a promotion only makes sense to send to a prospective or react customer.  It’s an investment into their future purchases, and sending the same promotion to an active customer will just eat away at your margins because they would have likely bought anyway.  Know how to best slice your clientele base against your promotions and campaigns to get the best return possible.

Don’t forget to always Test, test, and test

How do you know who and when to target, you ask?  Well, the answer is simple….test, test, and test some more. If your standard campaign is sent to accounts that have ordered in the last 12 months, split out a segment that ordered in the last 6 months.  Perhaps the return to this tested segment will be incremental enough to justify a smaller segment.  Without continuous testing, it will be extremely difficult to fine-tune and target your campaigns accordingly.

 Distribute Funds across various platforms

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.  Your marketing budget will cover your standard communication channels and media types that you have traditionally invested in; however, don’t be afraid to take a small portion of the budget and branch out.  Test a new social media channel or a new advertising medium.  Trying new ways of reaching your intended audience can be a great way to increase engagement and the results of your campaigns.

Set Goals per Campaign

Begin each campaign with an exercise of identifying what you are trying to achieve.  It doesn’t have to be a perfect science.  But if you go through the thought process of determining a value you want to reach, once the campaign is executed, it helps to have something to measure against.  Did you come close to your target?  Or, were you way off?  Did the disparity between goals and results have to do with the campaign, or with your set number?   Either way, setting goals will guide you through the process of looking more thoroughly at each campaign and implementing the necessary changes to make it optimal.

Walk away from what’s not working

Like a bad relationship, if something is just not working, it’s time to walk away. Don’t keep trying to make it work.  The amount of time and resources invested into these types of projects will become a drain on your budget.  And the best thing you can do for the overall health of your budget is to know when it’s time to move on invest your funds elsewhere.

Now, here’s to a happy and prosperous 2018 everyone! And may you reach December with exponential gains earned through your wisely invested funds to continue to generate success for each year ahead.

Written by Pamela Ossa-Kane, Director of Marketing & Communications