Five ways to make your digital marketing budget go further
As any experienced marketer will tell you, digital marketing can be a time and money pit. But only if you aren’t careful. There is always more you could be doing. New channels to try and new audiences to reach. It’s easy for your digital marketing budget to spiral out of control. Especially if you’re without a clear strategy to follow and without regularly reviewing the effectiveness of your campaigns,
Small businesses and start-ups can’t afford to lose track of online marketing spending. They need to squeeze every penny from the budgets they do have. Here are 5 ways you can adjust and hone your strategy so as to make the best use of your resources. We’ll show you how to make your money go further:
1 – Shop around
If you need to outsource services such as graphic design or content writing, don’t just accept the first quote you receive. Shop around, do your research and find a balance between quality and value for money.
2 – Use strategies that complement each other
Rather than investing chunks of money into strategies that work separately from each other, Forbes.com’s Jason DeMers recommends using approaches that complement, enhance and feed into each other:
“For example. Content marketing and SEO are two strategies that could feasibly be invested in separately. But if you invest in both of them, each will help the other see better results. In this case, content will give you more opportunities to build relevance for your target SEO keywords. SEO will drive more traffic to your content so it gets more views, shares, and conversions.”
3 – If it isn’t working, stop doing it
Unless it’s a strategy or campaign that is known to take a long time to reap results, stop doing something if it isn’t working. Blue Fountain Media’s Gabriel Shaoolian, writing on Huffingtonpost.com, recommends prioritising spending on campaigns and channels that have proven ROI, then you can work on other things when you have the money to do so.
4 – Focus on doing one or two things well
One mistake that new brands make when getting started with online marketing is to spread themselves too thinly. Trying to cover every channel at once. This will never work. So choose just one or two. The ones your target customers use. Focus on using them really, really well.
5 – Make clever use of repurposing
Instead of finding yourself trapped in a cycle of creating fresh content – an extremely time and resource intensive situation – you can repurpose your existing content to new platforms and channels. This doesn’t mean posting the same thing again and again, but repurposing the structure and essential message of content for use in the future or for a different audience can save you a lot of time.
