One way to boost the return on investment of your marketing strategy is to increase the return side of the equation, reaching more people and seeing better results. But you can see an even higher ROI by lowering the other side of the equation, reducing your marketing expenses without affecting your impact.
How do you do it?
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First Things First: Don’t Compromise on Quality
Before we delve into strategies to reduce your marketing expenses, there’s one important point to make: don’t compromise on quality. There are many strategies that can reduce your marketing expenses by reducing the quality of your final output, but these should be avoided.
You need to make sure all your marketing materials are effectively designed and distributed; otherwise, they’re not worth creating at all.
Easy Ways to Reduce Your Marketing Expenses
With quality as your highest priority, these are some of the best ways to reduce your marketing expenses.
1. Shop around for more cost-effective providers. Chances are, most of your marketing and advertising strategies depend on at least one external provider. For each existing provider you’re using, consider shopping around for a less expensive, yet equally high-quality competitor. For example, if you’re tired of overpaying for printed marketing materials, shop for a cost-effective printer near you. If you’re concerned about quality, get some test materials created so you can judge them against your existing partner.
2. Hire contractors. Most businesses pursuing marketing are tempted to hire full-time workers or work with an external agency. Both of these options can be expensive. Instead, it may be in your best interest to hire independent contractors. It can be challenging to find valuable, efficient, and reliable contractors, but once you have a few on your side, you’ll be in a much better position to accomplish excellent work without spending too much money.
3. Monitor closely and cull underperformers. Keep a close eye on marketing metrics for all your marketing and advertising strategies. When you notice that one or more strategies is underperforming, simply cut it. You’re better off doubling down on strategies that do work.
4. Improve audience targeting and relevance. Every marketing strategy can increase its effectiveness by improving its audience targeting and relevance. Instead of speaking to a broad, generic audience, speak specifically to your target demographics. If you don’t know who your demographics are, use market research to define them and better understand them.
5. Focus on long-term strategies. In general, long-term marketing strategies have a better payoff than short-term marketing strategies. That’s because you have more time to cultivate results, even if you’re not actively investing more in this strategy. Strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) are perfect for this.
6. Automate everything you can. Marketing automation is incredibly powerful because it can increase your reach and your results consistently without demanding more time or money on your part. Automate as much as you can in your marketing and advertising campaigns.
7. Stop accumulating new tools. Marketing tools can be fantastic assets, but they can also be expensive. Try to limit the number of marketing tools you use; few businesses need to be spending thousands of dollars per month on dozens of tools that are barely if ever, used.
8. Invest in evergreen materials. An “evergreen” material is a material without an expiration date. It’s not tied to any temporary event or circumstance, so it has the potential to be relevant indefinitely. When creating marketing materials for your brand or developing content online, always prioritize these evergreen materials, as they can be indefinitely redistributed, recreated, and reused. In other words, it’s an investment that keeps providing returns.
9. Utilize free channels. Don’t forget about free and inexpensive channels. If you want to be featured in a paid advertisement in Google search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to pay for the privilege. But it’s completely free to create accounts on social media and make new posts on a regular basis. Organic reach on social media isn’t fantastic, but any returns you get from this strategy will be pure profit.
10. Cultivate word of mouth referrals. Word of mouth marketing remains one of the most effective ways to market a business, in part because it’s ridiculously inexpensive and in part, because people trust each other more than they trust conventional marketing or sales tactics. Use customer loyalty programs and customer referral programs to help word of your business spread.
It’s very hard to see marketing and advertising success without investing at least some money. At the same time, most companies are overspending on their marketing materials. With these strategies, you should be in a much better position to reduce your marketing budget without affecting the quality or effectiveness of your materials.