How to Reduce Marketing Costs While Still Increasing Business Growth
5 Ways to immediately reduce your costs
By Christina Martinez
Many so-called traditional marketing methods such as advertising, trade shows and print literature are huge cost-drivers in any marketing budget. The good news is that it is possible to reduce these marketing costs and still be highly effective. Here are 5 ideas to immediately reduce your costs while still maximizing marketing results.
- Know the Customer. Marketing is expensive, and mistakes can crush a marketing budget. Avoid mistakes by getting acquainted with the customer. Know the segments, needs, decision makers and more by collecting and using data. House all of your customer data in a database or by using marketing automation software that can be updated easily.
Conduct research. One of the easiest ways to do this is by regularly surveying your customers and their needs. Surveys are inexpensive, and they will give you valuable information that can be used as a foundation for guiding marketing decisions. If you have trouble getting your customers to take your surveys, then provide incentives.
- Establish On-line Presence. Advertising is often the most costly component of any marketing budget. Gear your budget to invest more into search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing through blogging and social media.
Your website ranking can also make or break your marketing efforts. Chikita, an ad network, has continuously monitored search results to find that the top result on Google sees a 32.5% click-through rate, with continuous drop-offs from there (91.5% of clicks occur on the first page). So what exactly does this mean? Unless your website is ranked in the top few search result positions, all of the advertising in the world will not help you. Establish a quality website that is comparable to your leading competitors. And don’t forget to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly.
- Print Brochures are so 2005. Print may not be dead, but it could use some help. Whether seeing decreasing success in direct mail or increasing costs in brochure printing, it may be time to put more resources towards digital branding. Actively provide PDF versions of your advertising, and reduce print runs. You can always keep brochures ready to be printed on a single-run, as opposed to wasting the money and space to store thousands of brochures. Furthermore, you can upload all of your PDF’s to a cloud storage provider like Dropbox, allowing potential customers to view your material more easily!
- Shape your Brand with Publicity. A saying that you need to take to heart: “Advertising and marketing is about saying how great you are. PR is getting others to do it for you.” PR or publicity placements are free by definition, with awareness building that rivals advertising! One such way to utilize publicity is through the issuances of new worthy press releases.
A few examples of how you can use PR to your advantage:
- Release Products using Free or Paid PR Wire Services
- Free: Check out this list of Free PR Submission Sites
- Paid: Great sites include PRWeb, BusinessWire, and PRNewswire
- Build Relationships with Reporters and Journalists
- Find Public Speaking Opportunities
A few good ideas for what to share:
- Participating in a philanthropic event
- New, significant customer
- Receiving an award
- Partnership and strategic relationships
- Names of significant new hires and/or promotions
Become familiar with the many facets of PR and make it a fundamental piece to your integrated marketing communications strategy.
- Repurpose Your Content. Content is king, but it doesn’t have to take up a huge portion of your marketing budget. Create content that will interest your current and potential customers, suppliers and subcontractors. Use the same content in different formats. Blog about your projects, post about the projects on social media, create a corresponding video, introduce yourself to customers and prospects via email, develop surveys, host a webcast or podcast and much more.
In addition to this, generating evergreen content will allow you to stretch your money. Evergreen content is quality, useful content that is relevant to readers over a long period of time. The fundamental key with evergreen content is that it is relevant to readers whenever they may run across it. It has (virtually) no expiration date and ideally will retain its value over the long-term.
Reducing marketing expenses for your business can be simple. Just be sure that you have a plan and follow through. It’s worth the savings!
Christina Martinez is Triune’s Director of Marketing and Business Development. Christina brings over 10 years of high level marketing experience to Triune. Triune is a leading, integrated, design-build General Contractor founded in 1997. Triune is headquartered in Dallas, TX – www.tmvllc.us
The Punch List is Triune’s proprietary blog for discussing issues and providing insight specific to the commercial construction industry. Copyright 2013 TMV, LLC (Triune). Any and all rights reserved.
