Are You Wasting Your Marketing Budget?
When planning marketing activities and budgets a common mistake is to set the entire year of campaigns at once, define all the platforms to be used and allocate budget, then treat that as if it were set in stone. We're not suggesting companies stop planning their marketing activities in advance – there are many strategies that are always worth pursuing and for which you can earmark budget at the start of your fiscal year. SEO activities, regular content updating and marketing and social follower acquisition are all worthwhile activities that can carry on all year round at a set pace.
What we are suggesting is that companies look at their marketing budget with more flexibility. Rather than allocate your entire budget to activities at the start of the financial year, leave some budget floating for activities that you don't know about yet. There might be a ground-breaking technological leap in your industry in the next 12 months that requires marketing investment to leverage to your customer base.
You may hire a shining star and want to create video content showing off your new staff member and their expertise. There might be the opportunity to get involved in a new platform, for which you'll need to account for research and content creation. This doesn't always have to cost a lot of money as you may have the talent required for videography in-house. It is still worth having this flexible approach to marketing activities even when there's no need to allocate any budget to them.
With a more flexible attitude, and the acceptance that you will change the strategy and re-allocate budget, you'll maximise the return on your investment in the most efficient way, moving money from a campaign or strategy that isn't working any more to one which is coming up with the goods. Of course, knowing which activity is working the best and which ones to cut isn't easy, so our insight into marketing success and your clearly defined goals and targets are vital in this decision making.
If new strategies and platforms appear, the tendency is to go all in, or ignore it completely. It is far better to find a way to test the waters with a small campaign, so keep a little “mad money” back to spend on activities that might be worth a shot. Armed with the knowledge of how a new strategy or platform works for you, you can make a decision on allocating more budget, or keeping that money where it is working smarter for you.
We don't always have to change or add things into the marketing mix to be savvier about how we spend our cash; a good exercise for testing the validity of your budget is to cut the amount in half, and then see where you'd put that money for the best return on that investment. This can reveal the activities and channels that you're certain are working for you, and which could be cut if needed. You may even decide to put a few activities on a probationary period and see whether they're still earning the sales in a few months. If not, direct that budget elsewhere.
Here at Parua we are great at taking a marketing budget and allocating it towards the activities, channels and platforms that work for each client. No two clients are the same, so we take an individual and fluid approach to budget allocation, allowing us to redirect the money where it is performing best for you. If you want to stop wasting your marketing budget call us today.
