How to make the most out of your marketing budget: 4 key tips

Marketing can easily be regarded as one of the most important activities that can ensure an organization’s survival in the long run.

Effectively promoting your product has become almost as important as creating a useful one.

Every year businesses are adding up funds in their marketing budget so that they can manage to communicate their offering to their customers in a more effective manner than their rivals.

However, is a heavy marketing budget enough to bring desirable results in today’s highly competitive business scenario?

Where many businesses fail is in thoughtfully allocating their funds when it comes to specific marketing operations and channels.

Optimizing your budget is something that can make you get the most out of your marketing budget, and be a level above your competitors who are spending equally in their marketing budget as well.

Let’s look at four such ways in which you can optimize your budget to the fullest.

(1) Pinpoint your Goals

It’s very often that a business sets marketing goals that are seemingly specific, but in reality, they are of a highly generic nature.

Let’s simplify this with an example: 

Let’s say, your firm’s digital marketing objective for this year is to increase the current social media lead generation rates by 0.5 %.

Even though this is a measurable goal, but it’s not that specific.

Your marketing goal should always have an explicit mention of that particular source that you would leverage in order to achieve your goal.

In this case, you need to ascertain that specific social media platform that you are going to target (for example Facebook), and the specific social media lead generation strategy that you would focus on, for example, video advertising.

Setting acutely specific goals would help you in taking a relatively more detailed decision regarding the budget that you have set aside for this particular activity.

(2)  Carefully adapting industry trends

There is a strong reason behind a certain business practice or strategy becoming a popular trend in the industry:

And that’s because such a practice/strategy is capable of providing significant value to their target consumers.

Following industry trends can always be a sure-shot roadmap to success for a business:

However, blindly following a trend without considering the dynamics of your business can be counter-intuitive.

For example, one of the most popular trend going on in the marketing industry as of now is the use of AI-based Chatbots.

So if you are having any bot development plans for your own firm, you should ensure that your chatbot has those particular functionalities that can provide the maximum value for your target customers.

(3) Scrutinising your previous marketing efforts

One of the advantages of analyzing previous marketing strategies you can get to categorize your previous marketing operations effectively.

Generally, you can categorize your marketing activities into three main categories namely,

• The Successful ones that are generating sufficient ROI.
•   The Ones that have failed to generate sufficient ROI.

• And the ones that have shown a strong potential of generating ROI in the future.

In this way, you can properly decide the allocation of your marketing budget primarily based on Previous Success and the future scope of your marketing operations.

However, something that you should always set aside a certain amount of marketing budget for is Research and Development.

This is especially regarding finding and testing new marketing operations/channels.

(4) Having a cautious approach towards new ventures

There’s always a chunk of the overall digital marketing budget that is set aside for new and prospective marketing ventures.

However, it’s very often that the sum that is allocated is barely able to bring any perceptive ROI for the business.

Accurately determining the success/failure of a new marketing venture is something that is not completely feasible for a business.

So the best way is to invest in new marketing ventures on a small scale basis and not go all-in with your budget at first.

Choose a particular segment within your overall customer base and test the performance of your new marketing venture on this segment first.

There are two strong reasons for this:

·      The revenue that you generate from the small scale operations can act as a buffer when you finally go for full-scale operations with that marketing venture.

This significantly reduces the risk of suffering detrimental losses if the full-scale operations fail.

·      You get a good idea regarding the manner in which you can actually scale up this new initiative, and whether you need to leverage your other existing marketing operations/channels for this.

Concluding…

There are a myriad of tactics and strategies that are available to a business, when it comes to marketing.

However the challenge is to find those strategies that can bring optimum ROI for your business.

Therefore you need to be confident that the marketing operations on which you are putting your resources would bring you the desired results.