Getting More From Your Marketing Budget
As the economy continues to shrink, marketing budgets get smaller and smaller. In tough times, marketing budgets should actually be getting bigger not smaller. Why? Because there are many bargains to be had. Now is the time to negotiate with vendors who are losing business due to the economy. Things are tough all over. That gives you a chance get more for less and enhance value you get for each dollar spent.
The good news is that as the economy struggles, advertising, direct marketing, and other forms of promotion can be negotiated. Long gone are the days of $20 CPM’s. Keep in mind that everyone is struggling and as a result, you can often get a better price on what you’ve been purchasing.
Take stock of all of your marketing spend. Whether it’s for online advertising or simply direct mail, get a good understanding of all the costs involved in your project. Perhaps you’ve been sending post cards to your target prospects. Speak with your printer or mail house and see how they might be able to improve their pricing. With direct mail you have numerous options. Don’t be afraid to negotiate the cost of supplies.
Once you’ve reviewed your marketing campaigns, take a closer look at your online spend. Any online marketing campaign has profitable and unprofitable aspects to it. As yourself where you spend has been most effective. Reallocate your budget to the successful campaigns or others like it. Now it the time to pause those campaigns that just haven’t proven themselves successful. This reduces your expense and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
After a thorough review of your marketing expenses, your are in a much better position for determining how you can group promotions to lower costs and improve sell through. Consider how you might take advantage of your current campaigns. Do you ask customers to forward a promotion to a friend? Are you communicating to your mailing list on a regular basis? Are you collecting information about your consumers that can help you customize your campaigns and improve conversion rates? Think through each touch point and how you might improve your sales.
To be effective with a smaller budget, you really need to consider how you can reduce costs while improving the effectiveness of your marketing. Reducing costs can seem a bit frightening at first but assume that you can still improve your results with less marketing. In essence, you are focusing on enhancing the results of your campaigns while purging what hasn’t worked.
Once you have found the campaigns that really produce positive results, consider how you can make them even more effective. Viral and social media, encouraging others to take advantage of your offers, is a great method for generating results and doesn’t cost a lot. When marketers see something that’s working, they often leave it alone. If you have specific campaigns that produce results, focus on expanding the campaigns and scaling them. This ensure that you are creating a sustainable campaign that gives you what you’re looking for in difficult times - greater results with a smaller budget.
Comment by James on 4 July 2009:
I,m new to Internet Marketing, so buying anything right now is not in my budget. But I will save this site so I can return to get some real Marketing tools.