Every business needs to set a marketing budget. Firstly, you need a budget to ensure you have some money earmarked to spend on your marketing strategies. Secondly, your budget ensures you limit the amount of money you spend so that you can avoid overspending on marketing. Small businesses will often have small marketing budgets, but a smaller budget doesn’t have to prevent you from creating effective marketing strategies. You can make your marketing budget go further and ensure you get a good return on your investment if you know how.
When your marketing budget doesn’t really seem large enough to get you very far, there are a few things you can do to change that. Take a look at these tips to squeeze more value from even a small marketing budget.
Outsource Your Marketing
An entire team of in-house marketers is going to be expensive. Not everyone can afford to have a whole marketing department, so you might have just a small team of people who work on marketing. But you can also expand beyond your in-house team to stretch your marketing budget. When you work with an SEO agency or a similar marketing service, you get a whole team of people who can provide you with essential marketing services. You can also outsource to individuals and freelancers, who are often more cost-effective than full-time employees. Outsourcing can help you save a lot of money.
Use the Most Cost-Effective Channels
Making sure you’re using the most cost-effective marketing channels is vital if you want your marketing budget to go as far as possible. If you’re using marketing strategies that are expensive and don’t give you a great return on your investment, you might as well be throwing your money away. However, which channels are most effective could depend on your business. For some businesses, the most effective methods could be email marketing or PPC ads. Others could find that offline marketing methods such as direct mail are an effective way to reach their audience.
Combine Complementary Strategies
When you’re deciding which marketing strategies work best for your business, consider using strategies that complement each other. Different marketing channels can go hand in hand and help you to get more from your budget. For example, content marketing goes well with several other types of marketing, including SEO, email marketing, and social media marketing. Once you have good content, you can distribute it through multiple channels to provide people with useful and engaging materials. The different strategies can support each other. Good content improves your SEO and better SEO performance will drive more traffic to your site.
Track Important Analytics and Metrics
Whenever you’re working on a marketing campaign, it’s essential to know what’s working and what’s not. If you continue to put money into something that’s not working, you’re just wasting part of your marketing budget that could be put to better use elsewhere. Make sure you’re using analytics tools to track important metrics for your marketing. This is easy when you want to track things like traffic and conversions on your website, but it can be a little trickier for some other marketing metrics. Offline marketing methods can be particularly tricky to track if you want to know how they’re performing.
Repurpose Marketing Materials
When you’ve put time into developing new marketing materials, you don’t want them to go to waste. One way to make them go further is to repurpose your materials and use them in different ways. For example, an ebook could be turned into a series of blog posts or emails. A blog post could also be turned into a video that provides a more engaging way for people to learn new things. By repurposing marketing materials, you can get more value from anything that you create and save money too.
Keep Experimenting
Trying new things is an important part of ensuring your marketing budget goes as far as possible. You might be getting a good return on investment through a strategy that you’re currently using, but there could be better options out there. Experimenting with your marketing should help you to identify the best choices to make. You can run low-cost experiments on a small scale and then scale it up if you notice positive results. This is particularly easy to do with digital marketing methods such as PPC advertising.
If you want to get more from your marketing budget, keep trying out new things and monitor your activities carefully. You want to ensure that not only are you staying within your budget but you’re also getting a good ROI.
