How to Reduce Your Marketing Budget Without Reducing Results

Alt Title: How to Cut Back on Marketing Without Losing Effectiveness

If your business is trying to get through a difficult period or you’re just trying to improve profitability, you might be interested in making cuts to your marketing budget. But how can you make these cuts without jeopardizing the effectiveness of your campaigns?

For most businesses, marketing and advertising are non-optional. Without these campaigns driving more visibility and more sales, your revenue stream could dry up. At the same time, overspending could compromise your effectiveness here – and make your marketing and advertising approach do more harm than good.

Fortunately, there are several strategies you can implement to reduce your marketing budget without negatively impacting your results.

Start With an Audit

Everything starts with a marketing audit. Before you can make any effective decisions about reducing your budget or improving your effectiveness, you need to know what your current habits are.

That’s why you should examine at least the following throughout your marketing department:

· Spending. How much are you spending on various strategies? How much is your total marketing budget? It’s best to break this down as much as possible. For example, how much are you spending on employee salaries within the department and how much are you spending on marketing and advertising materials? Are you spending money with an external agency or with a team of freelancers? You should be accounting for every dollar.

· Core strategies. Which strategies lie at the core of your marketing and advertising campaign? Is there one strategy or approach that serves as the heart of your other tactics? Or do you use a variety of tactics in conjunction with each other to get results?

· Results. Speaking of results, which of your tactics are most and least effective? You should be looking at KPIs associated with each of your strategies, as well as the overall return on investment (ROI) you see for each one.

Cut Your Least Effective Strategies

In the course of your analysis, you should have identified at least some strategies that are disproportionately beneficial for your brand and some strategies that are disproportionately non-beneficial. For example, you may find that your Google advertising campaign has an ROI of 80 percent, while your email marketing strategy has an ROI of nearly 400 percent.

Once you finalize this analysis, the decision should be easy. Start cutting strategies and tactics that don’t provide you a meaningful return.

Shop for Different Providers

Consider shopping around for different marketing and advertising service providers. For example, how much are you currently paying for professional printing services? Is there another printer who offers similar quality for a reduced price? If you’re working with an agency, do they have a cheaper plan available or can you shop around for a different agency?

You can even start asking these questions about your own internal department. Do you really need a team of 10 people, or could you get by with 7? Look for any opportunity to maintain your current momentum while spending less.

Take Advantage of Free and Inexpensive Strategies

One way to keep promoting your brand inexpensively is to take advantage of free and inexpensive marketing and advertising approaches. These are some of the most popular:

· Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy designed to increase your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By writing content, improving your website code, and building links, you can easily generate more traffic organically.

· Social media marketing. It’s completely free to sign up for a social media profile for your business. Organic reach isn’t always easy to achieve, but it is always relatively inexpensive.

· Referral marketing and word of mouth. If you really want to cut costs, consider pushing harder for referral marketing and word of mouth marketing. Instead of paying for new advertisements, give your customers excellent experiences and incentivize them to talk favorably about your brand.

Eliminate Tools You No Longer Need

Pay attention to any marketing tools for which you’re currently paying – and eliminate any tools that aren’t justifying their value. There’s no reason to stay subscribed to an app that your marketing team barely touches. You might be surprised to learn how much you’re paying for unnecessary subscriptions.

Repurpose and Redistribute

Instead of creating new things all the time, consider repurposing and redistributing materials you already have. Can you print more copies of a flyer you designed last year? Can you take some of your blog posts and consolidate them together to create a finished eBook?

These are just some of the ways that you can improve efficiency and performance in your marketing department, while lowering your overall expenses. Keep tinkering with ways to improve your department and see better results without having to hemorrhage more money to do it.