As a business focusing on growth, you must maintain strong control over your finances and your budget. Frustratingly, when you’re considering tightening your purse strings, the marketing budget is often the first to be cut. You need marketing budget optimisation.
From a growth and development perspective, this instinctive approach to budget-cutting has the potential to hinder your development and effectively squander the progress you’ve made as a small business. And cutting away at your marketing budget as a knee-jerk reaction to save costs, could have dire consequences for the future of your enterprise.
As a valuable resource within your business arsenal, failing to budget your marketing strategy appropriately could impact your market share, create difficulty in attracting new customers and place current customer relationships and their loyalty to your brand in jeopardy.
But what if making changes to your budget approach didn’t have to impact your business growth? What if the right approach, did in fact help your business to thrive and improve your overall cost efficiency? It might sound too good to be true, but more businesses than ever are discovering a pragmatic approach to their marketing budget, and instead of cutting away at their finely tuned figures, are searching for ways to optimise it instead.
To ensure that your enterprise continues to tell its story, draw in new clients, and retains a strong following, marketing budget optimisation is the only solution. Let’s explore some channels for optimisation here.
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Focus On Marketing to Your Current Customer Needs
When those purse strings need tightening, it’s all too easy to turn your focus onto driving up your customer numbers in the desperate hope of increasing your revenue. Frustratingly, many businesses fail to understand that this approach means neglecting your current client base, which in turn jeopardises loyalty to your brand and could also be a significant blow to your financial survival.
Retaining the clients, you already have is significantly more cost-effective than trying to attract new ones, therefore in terms of marketing budget optimisation, it makes sense to shift your focus onto marketing to your current customer’s needs. Centring your optimised budget onto improving customer satisfaction and a results-driven upselling strategy, will not only keep your revenue up, but it also means those precious clients are less likely to look elsewhere.
Strategies to Examine to Improve Cost Efficiency
With the right training and insight, you’ll be able to increase the AOV (average order value) of your existing client base and prevent them from turning to other companies. In addition, marketing to your current customers’ needs may increase your clientele, thanks to word of mouth recommendations and additional sales revenue. Consider the following strategies to market to your current customers’ needs with a marketing budget optimisation approach.
- Customer follow-ups after sales will continue to build and maintain relationships with current customers and increase your upsell potential. Consider continuing the dialogue around new products and offers
- Keep it personal with personalised customer service and one on one support where needed
- Strip away items that aren’t selling and update your products and services by offering more choice within specifically successful product lines
- Create a loyalty program
Utilise the Data You Have
While it’s tempting to quickly cut away at your marketing approach and rapidly release funds by removing the components that aren’t performing as well as you’d like, scrutinising the valuable data at your fingertips before you make a change to your marketing budget is crucial. A marketing budget optimisation approach means examining the analytical data gathered from your current marketing plans with a fine toothcomb, and using this precious data to understand which areas are meeting your requirements and which are simply, deadweight.
Strategies to Examine to Improve Cost Efficiency
First, explore data provided by your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including:
- Customer acquisition cost
- Digital Marketing ROI
- Landing Page Conversion Rates
- Social Media Traffic Conversions
- Mobile Traffic Conversions
You’ll also be able to gather valuable data from other sources such as Google Analytics tools, where you’ll get a detailed insight into session durations, pages per session, bounce rate and where your traffic is coming from. Creating an extensive mix of invaluable data that will not only make your marketing potential crystal clear but also highlight the areas that are a drain on your current, limited resources.
The evaluations garnered from this data, can be used to help business owners develop a refreshed marketing approach, retarget campaigns and underline areas of the customer journey that can be improved, giving them the conversion rates, they need to drive their company forward.
Shine a Light on Digital Marketing
We’re living in an increasingly digitised world, and when you refocus your marketing budget with optimisation in mind, your business will be able to thrive within it. Shifting your tired, expensive, and unsuccessful marketing strategies to a digital marketing approach will optimise your budget and increase your ROI, all without jeopardising your business success. Choosing to shine a light on digital marketing is a cost-effective approach to marketing budget optimisation, ensuring you’re making the most of your financial position and utilising your resources proficiently.
Strategies to Examine to Improve Cost Efficiency
An optimised digital marketing approach, ensures more leads, helps to build your brand value, increase your ROI, and is incredibly cost-effective for enterprises looking to increase their revenue whilst maintaining control of the costs associated with marketing. Consider these strategies to improve your cost efficiency and optimise your marketing budget.
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing e.g., blogs, video content, infographics, listicles
- Email marketing
- PPC
- SEO
- Influencer marketing
Analysing your KPIs and data can help determine which approach is best for your enterprise.
Repurpose and Reuse Your Content
Sourcing content and making it as fresh as possible should be an integral part of your marketing budget optimisation strategy. Of course, if companies don’t have the budget to fund a continuous cycle of new content, then it’s not uncommon for small businesses to find their marketing attempts become stagnant and ultimately, fruitless. Optimising your budget doesn’t necessarily mean stripping back on your new content requirements, it means a fresh approach that not only saves you money but also maximises your ROI.
Strategies to Examine to Improve Cost Efficiency
Instead of creating an expensive and time-consuming cycle of creativity, multiple approaches can improve the cost efficiency of your current content.
- Recycle your content and share it across (new) multiple platforms and applications
- Revisit your existing content and update it with the latest information to keep it relevant and engaging for your audience
- Repurpose your blog posts into eye-catching infographics
- If you’ve hosted webinars in the past, upload this event to YouTube, so new customers can enjoy it and current clients can return to it if needed
- Turn old blog posts into helpful guides or FAQ pages
Consider Smart Outsourcing
As a business striving for growth, your goal is to achieve the best ROI possible on your marketing budget. This explains why outsourcing your marketing efforts is now considered a primary element of marketing budget optimisation. In simple terms, hosting an in-house marketing team and all the financial obligations that come with it is considerably more expensive than outsourcing to an agency. While some initial costs are attributed to outsourcing, the benefits to your budget and your marketing strategies are clear.
The benefits of outsourcing are clear
- Businesses will have the experience of industry professionals at their disposal, increasing your competitive edge
- Fully tailored collaborations to match your current marketing and financial requirements with the option to grow
- Increased turnover and production times
- ROI offsets the initial costs of outsourcing
- Project focus means a higher quality outcome of campaigns
Now It’s Your Turn
Marketing budget optimisation allows businesses to maximise their ROI and push the limits of their success, without compromising on their limited finances. Consider your current data, and marketing approach to get started.
Or – if all this seems slightly overwhelming, get in touch. Your initial consultation is free so what do we have to lose from a chat – other than 30 minutes.
That 30 minutes could transform your business… What are you waiting for, get in touch with me today.