With more marketing technology available than ever, and customers more attuned to indirect marketing techniques, there is no reason to increase your marketing spend in 2019. Here are the top five ways to save your marketing spend this year without losing any of your reach or branding viability.
Automate, Automate, Automate
If you have not made serious considerations into automating certain aspects of your marketing, now is the time to do so. You can bet that your competitors have already invoked a certain level of automation into their processes. There is no reason to have your in-house staff writing out individual lead generation emails anymore, for instance. You can get the same level of performance out of a much less expensive system that does all of the heavy lifting for you.
Indirect Marketing
Take money away from direct ad spending and put it into indirect marketing. Direct marketing costs much more anyway, and it is becoming much less effective over time. Indirect marketing in partnership with smaller, targeted social influencer channels and websites will get you much more bang for your buck. You also get much better reach within a niche audience. If you are trying to expand into a more general or commercial audience, fear not. Once you have gained a foothold in your niche, the major search engines and social media platforms are programmed to organically lift your brand to the next level! (This means you don’t have to spend any money on it!)
Outsource the Heavy Lifting
Many of the marketing functions that you do not automate should be outsourced to a dedicated marketing firm. These are people who know how to execute marketing processes quickly. You save money instantly on the overhead that you no longer have to worry about. You also save because you only pay for an outsourced company when you need it. You don’t have to worry about sick days, insurance, the real estate to house employees, or any of the other expenses of traditional employment.
Use Free Tools
You can increase your martech stack quite significantly without paying for it, believe it or not. The proliferation of free tools online for virtually any marketing process is a phenomenon that you should not miss out on. No matter where the holes are in your marketing, you can find a free tool that will help you. This may even help you forgo paid automation and outsourcing partnerships, depending on how far you are willing to look.
Eliminate the Waste
As you are looking for new tools, teams and processes to save you money, you should be analyzing just how well these efforts are going. The number one way to save on your marketing spend is to analyze your processes, taking in new data as quickly as possible. As you find inefficiencies and waste, you immediately drop those things and replace them with more effective processes. This is certainly the least sexy of five ways to reduce your marketing spend, but it is the one that will probably end up saving you the most money.
If you are really looking to reduce your marketing budget and build on or maintain the same level of results as last year, then you will take the best practices above to heart. Keep your ear to the street for new tools that you may be able to use to help your marketing. Vet any partnerships very closely so that you do not have to switch back and forth between companies. More than anything, analyze what you are doing and immediately drop anything that is inefficient.
