Are you fed up with blowing your advertising budget on mediocre campaigns? Do you happen to be looking for a better return on your investments? Should the answer to any one of these questions be ‘yes’, then the below blog is exactly what you need.
When it comes to marketing strategies, it can become all too easy to throw good money after bad – and this can have a seriously detrimental effect on your business. Fortunately, there are several tried and tested techniques that you can adopt to ensure you make the most out of each and every dollar you spend.
Interested to find out more? Carry on reading to discover the best ways to save money on marketing and dramatically cut the cost of your next advertising campaign.
Carry out an audit
If you don’t know what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong, then how can you possibly expect to be able to make positive changes? This is why it is imperative that you carry out regular marketing audits.
Review all your current campaigns and any upcoming ones, paying close attention to what each channel is delivering or failing to deliver. This will allow you to cut out any low-performing channels and focus your efforts on what is actually working for your business.
Focus on customer targeting
If your sales team is bringing in leads, but these are not converting into sales, this could be because your customer targeting is off.
To resolve this, look at your existing customer profiles and seek feedback from your sales team. Do they know who their target audience is? Do they know which campaigns and platforms bring in the best leads?
Once you know which customers offer the best long-time value, you can then focus your efforts on targeting them.
Embrace promotional branded products
If your marketing campaigns are mostly digitally focused, then now might be the time to embrace more traditional and tangible methods. While digital marketing certainly has its place in any marketing strategy, the market is oversaturated with online ads, leading to advertising fatigue.
However, with promotional products such as these custom hats by Anthem Branding, you are offering customers something physical and tangible that they can associate with your brand. Furthermore, promotional products boost brand awareness, increase brand recognition, build trust in your brand, and attract new customers. Plus, they’re a nice gift to give to your customers, who will definitely appreciate them!
Create a referral program
If you are not already using the power of referrals to promote your business, now is the time to start. Providing the perfect way to attract and retain new customers, all you need to do is offer existing customers incentives to refer your business to their friends and family.
Some of the most popular incentives include reward points, money-off vouchers, and gift cards. A referral program also has the added benefit of making your existing customers feel valued and appreciated, which can help you retain them in the long term and even turn them into brand ambassadors.
Use marketing automation tools
Time is money, as the saying goes, so any wasted hours on marketing can cost your business dearly. Thankfully, technology has come to the rescue yet again with a whole host of helpful marketing automation tools that can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend on manual marketing tasks.
What’s more, many of these tools can be downloaded for free! Some of the most popular marketing tasks for automating include keyword research, reporting, email marketing, and social automation.
If you spend a lot of time responding to customer inquiries, then chatbots are a must for your business as they can reply to an infinite number of customers at any one time.
Create great content
If you have been spending a lot of your budget on paid search campaigns and paid social media marketing, then you should know there is a more affordable option.
Organic search refers to any search results that appear for a search query excluding paid ads, and this form of marketing is highly cost-effective. One of the best ways to appear high in SERPs (search engine result pages) without paying for space is to create great content.
This content can be in the form of blogs, articles, video content, or even an ebook. The key to great content is to provide informative posts rather than promotional ones. If you need help generating fresh and original content ideas, start doing some research and see what other businesses in your niche are doing – this will give you some much-needed content inspiration.
Post on social media
Although paid social ads can be expensive, there is no reason why you can’t employ the free aspect of social media. Make sure you regularly post on all your social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube, for maximum effect.
It can also be beneficial to see how your competitors are using social media to attract new customers and connect with their existing ones. Don’t outright copy what your rivals are doing, but you can use some of their ideas as a basis for your own and get some fresh inspiration to help you craft your own social media campaigns and content.
