3 smart strategies for managing your marketing budget

JUSTISIA SHIPENA
Managing your marketing budget can be tough. Here are some thoughts and tips.

Start by pausing underperforming initiatives, then optimise all remaining projects and leverage marketing automation.

Many new business owners are eager to promote their products, and they react by allocating more of their operating budget towards marketing.

As they begin to see their advertising expenses climb, it's important that they also analyse whether or not their money is spent wisely.

Below are three strategies you can employ to continue reaching new leads and converting them into customers while minimising your total marketing costs.

1. Continue funding channels that work

When you want to quickly curb costs, it's tempting to stop all activities, wholesale, until you can regroup and figure out what structure your new budget should take. But when it comes to marketing, slashing your spend at the top of the funnel can have significant consequences on your total sales.

That's why it is crucial that you identify your most tried and proven marketing channels and ensure there's always an adequate budget to keep them going. To better manage your expenses, pause major investments in new and experimental channels. This will free up more of your time and money so that you can continue running already profitable campaigns.

Once you've regained focus and improved your overall return on investment, then you can reconsider experimenting with new marketing outlets again.

2. Refresh and optimise your campaigns regularly

Cutting marketing costs usually means taking a scaled-down approach, but that doesn't mean that each buyer’s impression will have any less of an impact. When you sponsor fewer campaigns, you have to ensure that each one is delivered to the right audience and at the right time during their purchasing journey. This increases your chances of converting them into paying customers and minimises advertising waste.

Regularly audit all existing campaigns to ensure they mention the right product information, messaging and contact information. Verify that each ad links to the right destination and that their post-click experience is engaging and meets all of their expectations.

3. Employ marketing automation strategically

Time is money and also a limited resource. When your staff gets inundated with labour-intensive tasks, there's both a real financial cost due to the extra hours worked on a project and a meaningful opportunity cost due to underutilisation of their skills.

To help them maximise their work performance and accelerate the pace at which they complete their projects, you'll want to employ marketing automation to save them time, and save you money. These days, it's easier and more affordable than ever to schedule repetitive actions, manage your data seamlessly, and maintain contact with your customers using technology to assist your workforce.

For instance, if you currently invest a lot of time in lead nurturing, consider automating your engagement emails with customers using action or time-based triggers. When your employees aren't manually completing these tasks, they're able to allocate more time towards other high-impact initiatives. -www.inc.com