Marketing your small business should be an investment, not an expense. Every amount you invest should earn you more returns, whether that means increased website traffic, brand exposure, conversions, or sales.
However, earning more returns isn’t always about allocating more money to your marketing activities. You can also manage your current budget effectively to get maximum value from your marketing investment.
Here are 5 tips to maximize your small business marketing budget:
1. Test Before Spending
Testing every paid marketing activity before spending on it is important for several reasons.
- It saves you from making mistakes that can cost your small business more time and resources to fix in the long run.
- It enables you to spend the bulk of your allocated resources on what’s working, which increases your chances of getting better marketing results.
So, before you sign up for that new marketing service or tool, consider using the free trial version or requesting a demo to enable you to get a clearer picture of how it works and the value you’ll be getting if you invest in it.
Similarly, before you consider running a paid advertising campaign on social media, you should first run A/B tests on a small section of your target audience to find out which version of the ad produces better results.
2. Repurpose Your Existing Content
Marketing your small business effectively requires you regularly produce different informational and promotional materials.
These could include blog posts, case studies, webinars, social media posts, videos, TV and radio commercials, billboard ads, and brochures. However, creating high-quality content from scratch whenever you have a marketing need isn’t easy.
It takes time when you’re doing everything yourself and money when you hire someone else to do it for you. Content repurposing comes in handy when you don’t have enough time or money to create new content to market your small business.
Repurposing simply means taking your existing pieces of content and transforming them into something completely fresh and new for your audience.
For example, you can:
- Take an existing e-book and repurpose it into a series of shorter blog posts and vice versa.
- Take a webinar and repurpose it into an e-book, social media posts, blog posts, a video, etc.
- Turn your PowerPoint presentation slides into social media posts, infographics, etc.
Content repurposing, when done right, can benefit your small business in many ways, including helping you get more value from your content creation efforts, expanding your audience reach, and saving you time and money.
Just remember that information changes very fast in the digital world. What’s relevant to people today may not remain so in a few weeks or months.
So, you need to update your old pieces of content with the latest information before repurposing them to make them relevant and valuable to your target audience.
3. Outsource
Outsourcing is one of the best ways to maximize your small business marketing budget and draw more value from your marketing spending. In this case, outsourcing means hiring an external team of marketing experts to handle some or all of your marketing activities.
One of the benefits of doing so is that it gives you access to a wide range of resources and expertise that potentially help drive rapid growth in your business.
Secondly, outsourcing saves money that you would have used to hire, train and maintain full-time employees in your marketing department.
So, don’t hesitate to contact external experts when you need help handling your marketing tasks. The money you invest in outsourcing upfront can bring more returns to your business in the long run.
4. Ditch What’s Not Working
Another way to cut your marketing costs is by ditching the strategies that are consistently underperforming or fail to bring positive results.
For example, if you allocate money evenly to five different marketing strategies and after six months or so, you notice that one of them is constantly performing poorly, you should stop investing in it immediately.
Use that money instead to invest in what’s already working to maximize your return on investment. Think of the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. In business, this principle refers to 80 percent of a given business’s profit typically coming from 20 percent of its clients. In this case, let us swap in your marketing strategies.
5. Target the Right Audience
Lastly, you should always ensure that you’re targeting the right audience with your marketing campaigns.
Have you completed the exercises necessary to identify your target Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas?
When you know your ideal customer profile and the personas that make up your target audience, you can tailor your marketing messaging to suit their needs. When this objective is completed, it provides you a much better chance of persuading them to buy your products or services than when you market your business to everyone in the market.
Final thoughts
These 5 tips to maximize your small business marketing budget can yield surprising returns when put to the test. Remember, these are a sampling of strategies that can help you to get more returns from your marketing investment. It’s your turn to implement them to see what works for you.
Just remember the holy grail: right person, right message, right time.
