As we have acknowledged on this blog, businesses and their customers have both been financially struggling recently. We have already touched upon how you could tweak your marketing to target customers’ timely concerns — but how large is your marketing budget?
If it has shrunk as a result of energy costs gobbling much of it up, there remain various strategic ways you could cost-effectively keep up a high level — and standard — of marketing activity.
Outsource your marketing
If your business has traditionally had its own marketing department, economic realities mean that you may have to let it go. Training marketers, paying their salaries and investing in and updating equipment just for these staffers can all add heavily to your outgoings.
However, by outsourcing at least some of your firm’s marketing responsibilities to an external company like our own Darlington-based web development studio, you can draw upon specialist marketing expertise without paying a disproportionate price for it.
Figure out which methods seem to work best
You might have put your fingers in quite a few marketing pies, so to say. However, the fruits of your labours here could be quite variable, too.
Using a tool like Google Analytics, assess how these different marketing channels — perhaps including your website, advertising and social media — compare in their results.
If some of these methods are garnering a far better ROI (return on investment) than others, consider dropping the less successful of these and doubling down on the breadwinners.
Sample some cheap marketing tactics
Of course, marketing methods can differ not just in what they bring in but also what they expend. There might be some delightfully inexpensive ones that you have never tried for one reason or another — perhaps because you underestimated how useful they could be.
As certain marketing practices can be inexpensive or even free, trying them out — even if on a small scale at first — could give you a valuable insight without posing any significant risk to your company’s existing financial picture.
Indulge in print marketing
Old-fashioned though it may sound, you could hand out flyers in the street or ask businesses if posters for your own could be displayed on their premises. (Naturally, the latter tactic is likely to work best if these businesses aren’t directly competing with yours.)
We have graphic designers who could provide you with pleasingly eye-catching designs for posters, flyers and other print marketing materials.
Repurpose and refresh existing content
The idea with content marketing is that, after the content has been created, it can attract interest and generate sales in your absence. However, one issue with this situation is that you could have left much of your existing content untouched for a little too long.
In other words, it could have become outdated. A blog post about which iPhone to buy, for example, obviously needs updating at least once yearly, when new iPhones are released.
If your website does have any ageing content like this, you could arrange for digital copywriters from our team to overhaul or add to that copy.
