Marketing and advertising are the best strategies for attracting new customers to your brand, retaining your existing customers, and even improving your brand reputation. With the right tactics, you can multiply your number of visitors, increase your revenue, and allow the business to grow.
There’s just one catch—marketing and advertising can also be expensive. Designing, placing, and scaling your advertisements can eat up thousands of dollars, without even guaranteeing results.
Fortunately, there are several strategies that can help you save money on marketing and advertising—without compromising your quality or your results.
The Importance of ROI
First, it’s important to understand the nature of ROI (return on investment), arguably the most important metric in the marketing realm. Your marketing ROI is a measure of how much revenue a campaign has retuned to you, compared to how much you spent on it. The more money you make from a campaign relative to how much you spent on it, the more successful the campaign can be said to be.
In other words, don’t focus too much on saving money in the purest sense. Sometimes, spending more can grant you a higher ROI, which means each dollar you spend is going further to advance your goals. Keep this in mind as you read the other tips in this guide.
Find Inexpensive, Reliable Vendors
One of your biggest priorities will be finding inexpensive vendors that are also reliable. For many marketing and advertising strategies, you’ll need raw materials or products. Thanks to the internet, you’ll have a wide variety of vendors available. However, if you go with the first option you find on Google search, you might end up paying way too much for what you need, and if you go with the cheapest option, you might get an inferior quality product.
Take your time searching for vendors, and vet them by looking at their reviews and sending them trial runs. Eventually, you’ll be able to find trustworthy, inexpensive vendors for almost everything you need, from printed marketing materials to promotional products.
Focus on Permanent Assets When Possible
Some marketing tactics require you to produce temporary assets, while other marketing assets remain permanent. Here’s an example; creating a television ad requires you to purchase airtime. You can run your commercial several times during a given week, but once the run is over, the ad will be practically worthless. By contrast, if you create an in-depth whitepaper on your website that your customers value, it could feasibly last forever, continuing to return value to you.
Outsource Your Efforts
It may seem like the least expensive marketing option is to do all the work yourself, but this is rarely the case. Marketing agencies often charge thousands of dollars per month to manage a campaign, and contractors may be more expensive than you thought they’d be, but you’ll still end up paying less in the long run—for several reasons.
First, consider the role that expertise plays in both the quality and timeliness of your campaign. If you try to shoulder the burden of creating and launching a marketing campaign on your own, you’ll need to research the topic, learn new things, and painstakingly create the assets yourself. If a seasoned expert does this, they’ll be able to do it in a fraction of the time—and they’ll produce higher-quality work at the same time.
Second, think of all the ways you could be spending your time more profitably. If you’re not a marketing expert, but you’re an expert in something else, your working hours should be spent elsewhere.
Accordingly, even though the initial investment may seem high, most marketers end up saving money and seeing better results when they outsource to proper experts.
Measure Your Results and Only Use the Most Effective Tactics
Some marketing strategies are going to work better for your brand than others. If a strategy isn’t working, you have to cut your losses. If it’s working exceptionally well, consider investing more into it. It’s a simple concept, but one that many new marketers neglect.
To do this successfully, you have to be able to measure and analyze your marketing results. What is your definition of marketing success? Which marketing KPIs are most important to you? Experiment with new tactics long enough to see how they work for your brand, evaluate their effectiveness, then manage them accordingly.
Saving money on marketing and advertising isn’t always straightforward or easy, but there’s always a path to greater marketing efficiency. If you’re still struggling after applying these tactics, consider talking to an expert on the subject, such as a marketing mentor, or a firm you’ve worked with in the past. They may be able to help you see the areas in which you’re overspending or seeing unfavorable results.
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