Today’s guest post comes from Ellie Saunders, a young mother who is passionate about digital businesses. She is currently enjoying her marketing role at eVoice, a place where businesses can get virtual and toll-free numbers. This week she shares tips to save money with small business marketing.

How to Save Money on Your Marketing Budget

Marketing your business is key to its success and growth. However, you have to be careful not to spend all your money on marketing. It is not uncommon to hear that some business owners spend thousands on advertising and direct mail campaigns, only to end up with a very poor return on investment. To avoid this kind of anguish, it is important to consider some strategies to help save on your marketing budget. Here are some important points to consider for your marketing budget.

Focus on Quality Rather Than Quantity

You could easily be tempted to juggle several marketing initiatives at once, but this is rarely an effective plan, let alone profitable. It’s much more efficient to budget for a few quality marketing endeavours and find what works for your business, rather than putting money into many projects where only some end up working. Use this simple guide to measure your marketing efforts.

Use Your Social Networks

Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram do not cost a cent to sign up for. For this reason, Social Media is a no-brainer. You can save plenty of money building up your social media presence and following, and marketing through these free channels. The good thing about social networks is that you will be able to alert your followers about your promotions, connect with brand influencers, share unique content and offer customer support as well as get instant feedback from your customers and followers. Social media provides a good platform for creating leads in a cheap way. If things are going well in these channels, you can then start putting marketing dollars towards it by boosting popular posts. 

Use inexpensive Options for Lead Generation

Traditional advertising methods, like TV and radio spots, are generally expensive and struggle to be of any real value, especially to smaller businesses. Alternatives include things like Press Releases, SEO and banner advertising. Most smaller firms measure marketing effectiveness in regards to the number of leads created. Acquiring recognition or building an image is not as important.

Optimising web pages, blog content and press releases with keyword phrases can help draw increased organic search traffic and can be done relatively cheap. Other old-school techniques, on the other hand, can also be inexpensive. If you want to target local customers, consider things like trackable flyers. Setting up a virtual number with eVoice, for example, and putting it on your flyers will make it easy to track how many leads come in from such a campaign.

For more details, use this guide to take the mystery out of lead generation.

Avoid ‘Overspending’ on Branding

The gold embossed mailers, fancy four-colour brochures and annual reports presented by the Fortune 500 firms might seem like the right way to go about marketing your business, however, things like this can quickly go over budget.

The image, look and tone of your promotions must adhere to your product and market and not simply mirror what the competition or industry leaders put out. Literature that is too fancy for its intended audience is a complete waste of money. What’s more, poorly targeted content may never even reach the audience.

Research

It is important to read up on emerging marketing trends that can help you grow your operations. Audiences love to engage with new content forms so finding ways to incorporate new marketing strategies can be effective.

In addition to this, it’s important that your marketing strategy is refreshed every so often. Things like cold-calling might be what you have always done, but consider if the resources spent on such strategies are worth it. Social media and a blog on your website are standard marketing channels in 2018, and the best part is, such things are relatively inexpensive. 

Repurpose Content

When creating fresh marketing materials, you should keep repurposing at the front of your mind. Creating long-form, evergreen content is the most cost-effective way of marketing as the content will be relevant for a long time to come.

For repurposing to be possible, you have to create versatile content which you will not only use for long periods but can reshape into different formats and mediums. Doing this will help you save a lot of money which might be spent on new strategies, or used to bolster current campaigns. Even as you create reusable content, remember that you will still need to develop unique content for special promotions and holidays.

Marketing is an increasingly complex area. If you’re not careful and try to extend your efforts too far, you will quickly find yourself over-budget. Focusing your efforts on what works, using inexpensive methods, and tracking your efforts closely can help to save money on your marketing budget.

Looking to save more? By all means, download the Ultimate Guide to Free Small Business Marketing from myMarketing Cafe. It features 97 free tools and resources to take the sting out of marketing spending.