Here’s the challenge. You just started working on your 2012 marketing budget and you had assumed that you would have at least the same amount of money as last year. Or with your powers of persuasion you thought you could convince the management team that you needed a higher amount since you have several new product launches as well as the need to maintain the promotion of the existing products. But, you just learned that your marketing budget is being cut in half. You are devastated. What do you do?
Get out of your rut. Put a real succinct marketing strategy together and list several marketing objectives. Then look at the tactics and decide which ones will meet those objectives. For example, are you going to a certain trade show because “we’ve always attended” or “the boss expects us to to go”, or “it’s in a really cool location next year”? Don’t waste your precious marketing budget on frivolous tactics.
Measure each marketing source’s cost per lead. If you are using a lead tracking database, that’s the first place to start. And if you’re not, shame on you. Even a simple lead tracking system should suffice for this exercise. How do you know which tactics are working if you don’t continually monitor them and evaluate them. Make a comparison of each cost per lead for each marketing tactic and each media that you use.
Next, analyze each type of media or marketing channel that you used. Are you pulling better with print ads? Or are you getting higher quality leads from your online advertising? Did you get some good article placements or other publicity? And did that pull better than attending trade shows and speaking to your customers face-to-face? You may be surprised to find out that some of the higher cost per lead tactics derived the lowest quality leads.
Cut some high-cost activities. So, once you have done a thorough analysis, you may want to start out your marketing budget planning by cutting some of those high-cost activities for next year. You may not want to automatically eliminate all of those high-cost activities, but at least trim some of them even as much as 50%. Then you can look at the data the following year to see if that made any difference in the generation of lead quality. You may need some of those high-cost activities to reach other objectives than just lead generation. They may be important for building your brand or customer retention.
Look at lower-cost alternatives. Are you already sending out emails to your customers? And have you analyzed if they have worked? After you complete your audit, you may decide that you should communicate with your key customers more often. Even if it is an informal email to let them know about new products, promote a special offer, or to offer some important information about the industry. Whether your email distribution is done in-house or you use an outside service, the cost is generally minimal for email marketing projects. Also look at auto-responders and other types of lead nurturing emails. If a prospect or customer responds and clicks on a link in your email, what do you do then? Hopefully, you are responding to them with more information about their particular interest.
Test new ideas. As I mentioned above, we get stuck in a rut and continue to implement the same plan over and over again. Perhaps it is time to start learning about some of the latest innovative marketing tactics. Try new things. Be innovative. You may stumble at first, but always keep your mind open to new ways of marketing your products. You may have a learning curve, but as you get better at these tactics, you can then measure to see if you are getting a higher ROI than from the same old tactics you had been measuring. If you’re not comfortable with social media, for example, learn all you can about it and put a few campaigns in place.
Always review the data regularly. That could mean after each campaign, once a year, or quarterly depending upon your type of business. Look at the performance metrics and really analyze the best places to use your precious marketing budget.
So, you can deliver strong results even with a decreased marketing budget. You can do more with less. You just need to analyze your performance metrics and make some key decisions of where to cut out the wasteful portion of your budget.
