For many marketing managers, a constant challenge is making their budget go further year after year. More often than not, marketing may not necessarily be priority number one when it comes to your business. The good news however, is that there are ways to stretch your budget and make it work harder for you to get the best return on investment.
Go integrated
Using multiple agencies for advertising, design, PR and social media means you are spending time and money briefing different people, often on the same subject. Using an integrated agency not only saves time and money by bringing it into one team, but it also eliminates the possibility of various agencies interpreting the brief in a different way and creating a disjointed campaign.
Use results to educate your spend
Gather solid data on the effectiveness of your campaigns and use that to optimise your spend going forward. If you can identify certain patterns that work, for example if the highest number of sales came through email marketing, you can spend smarter next time.
Don’t be afraid to piggyback
Running your own events can be costly both in terms of time and money. While we’d never recommend completely cutting out holding your own events, you can piggyback on others to add to your face-to-face marketing programme. Research key sector events and negotiate with organisers for speaking opportunities or use industry exhibitions as a platform to entertain clients or launch new products.
Use free or low-cost monitoring tools
There are lots of free or low-cost tools you can use to cut down on evaluation spend. A few of our favourites include:
• Precise - a relatively low cost media monitoring system that picks up every piece of print or online coverage relating to your company. Buying through your agency often works out cheaper because they have the power of bulk buying for all their clients.
• Hootsuite - the free version provides an adequate number of reporting tools for social media and the pro version, which is still relatively inexpensive, contains even more.
• Google Analytics - allows you to review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions including sales, lead generation, page views and file downloads
• eBuild - our email marketing system comes with some of the best reporting features on the market, allowing you to track exactly who has opened your email and clicked on a link
Consider going regional
Regional marketing agencies often charge less than those based in London because it costs them less to operate. Business rates, staff wages and rents are generally lower which means they can pass the saving on to their clients. Consider using a regional or local agency to get more from your marketing spend.
Do you feel you’re doing all you can to exploit the marketing mix so that your budget goes further?
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