Below are several strategies for cutting marketing costs without killing the quality of your existing marketing campaigns. Improve your customer targeting Obtaining new customers costs money. A focus like that will help you get more from your existing marketing budget and avoid targeting customers that run your budget dry. What are you currently doing for marketing? In time, you can add back other channels. If you’re trying to cut back on man-hours, consider automating certain marketing tasks. Using this, you can link your social media, email marketing, lead management, and content-marketing efforts together. Repurpose content for new mediums: There’s more to content marketing than writing and publishing blog post after blog post. For example, you’re probably paying for keyword research software, a company CRM, social media management, email marketing tools and more. There are tons of high-quality free keyword research and SEO tools available, along with image creation, email marketing, social media and analytics tools.
Example? You’ll want to narrow your focus and ruthlessly market to the types of customers that convert and stay with you over the long term.
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One of the most important aspects of running a successful business is the need to continually market yourself. Without consistent and effective marketing, no one will know you exist.
But, marketing just for the sake of marketing won’t do any good, either. You need to be doing this effectively. Your marketing efforts need to strike a balance between making adequate expenditures yet not sacrificing the cash you need for other needs.
Below are several strategies for cutting marketing costs without killing the quality of your existing marketing campaigns. Yes! It is possible to achieve stellar marketing results, while cutting your budget.
1. Conduct a marketing audit.
The first place to start is a review of both your marketing budget and any related data. The goal of a marketing audit is to get a grip on how much you’re spending on marketing-related activities. These expenses may include:
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Content creation and promotion
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Social media ads you’re running, and their management
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Email marketing copy for the emails you send
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Additional forms of advertising, including print media
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Video scripting, creation and promotion
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Remarketing or retargeting efforts
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SEO efforts (or payments to an SEO consultant)
Depending on your business, this might be a big list. You’ll also want to quantify how much you’re spending across each marketing vertical. This includes any software you’re paying for, advertising fees and the costs of creating any media or marketing materials.
After you’ve done this you might be surprised to find areas where you’re greatly overspending and others where you could cut back right away.
2. Improve your customer targeting
Obtaining new customers costs money. What costs even more is the acquisition of customers that aren’t in your ideal market. They might buy something from you once, but you still might be at a net loss when you add up all the marketing fees it took to obtain them.
For this reason, you’ll want to narrow your focus and ruthlessly market to the types of customers that convert and stay with you over the long term. Study your existing marketing data and especially the profiles of your best customers. This should be where you focus nearly all of your efforts.
A focus like that will help you get more from your existing marketing budget and avoid targeting customers that run your budget dry.
3. Reduce the number of active marketing channels you use.
What are you currently doing for marketing? Chances are it’s probably a smattering of things: Creating and promoting blog content. Growing your social media accounts. Running paid advertising. Converting your content to new mediums like Quora and YouTube. Attending conferences. Cold emailing.
In the first step, you should have compiled a list of every marketing activity you’re currently undertaking. Now, it’s time to dive a little deeper.
It’s likely that not every channel is getting you quality leads. It’s time to cut those that aren’t.
Some things like SEO take time. But, if you’re in a budgeting crisis, you might want to put longer-term activities on hold while you double down on strategies that get you leads much faster.
In time, you can add back other channels. But, it’s a better use of your money to put all your energy into two or three channels, instead of spreading yourself too thin.
4. Use marketing automation tools.
If you’re trying to cut back on man-hours, consider automating certain marketing tasks. Automation will help free up you and your employees to focus on more valuable tasks.
Here are a few of the most common marketing tasks that you can automate:
Chatbots for social media: Chatbots are taking over the world. They’re most commonly employed via Facebook Messenger, and other social media sites, but they can be adapted to other platforms as well.
Chatbots can be used to accomplish tasks like gathering company intel, offering personalized support, responding on social media, promoting your content and more. Best of all, after you take the initial setup, these bots will run continuously without additional work required on your part.
An email autoresponder: Email autoresponders can help you build a deeper relationship with your subscribers without having to do any additional work. A well-written autoresponder can even act as part of a pre-sales sequence.
Let’s say someone joins your email list for a five-part email course you’ve created. With each email, you’ll provide some serious value and help people out in some way….
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