The economy is volatile, supply chains are erratic, and business remains unpredictable. In these conditions, you might be concerned about your marketing budget. It might be stable or it might be under pressure.
No matter what the status of your marketing budget, you want to squeeze every bit of value from what you have. Here are some quick tips for stretching your marketing budget to the limit—without negatively effecting your marketing results.
1. Emphasize What Works
If you’re going to pause weak programs, place more emphasis on what is working well. If email is delivering results, try sending a few more emails. If you’re earning opportunities from your presence on online directories, beef up with additional content or marketing opportunities. If webinars are popular, schedule more of them.
2. Repurpose Content
A great way to stretch marketing dollars is to repurpose existing content. Take that cornerstone white paper and create an infographic, a couple of blog posts, or a webinar. Turn a customer success story into pitch for media coverage. Repurposed content also has the benefit of helping you maintain a consistent message in your content.
3. Use Templates
If you’re creating everything from scratch, stop. Find and use a template for spec sheets, web pages, blog posts, and other content. You can save time and save money as well as ensure a consistent look and feel to your content.
4. Be Choosy with Social Media
If you’re burning time, resources, and budget posting to multiple social media channels, it might be time to scale back. LinkedIn is the social media network that engineers use the most. YouTube is important for video. Everything else takes a back seat. Instead of posting to a bunch of social media accounts, pick the best performing ones and post more to them.
5. More Email
Yes, old-fashioned email is still a great way to connect with the engineering audience. You likely already have a good house list and an email marketing platform. It doesn’t cost much to send extra emails. Don’t annoy your audience, but if you can come up with relevant and useful content, your marketing dollars spent might have a bigger impact.
6. Focus on Retention
If things are really tight, focus your marketing efforts more on customer retention—cross-selling and upselling—than on demand generation. Every marketer knows it costs a lot less to keep a current customer than it does to gain a new one.
7. Earn Media Coverage
A little attention in industry media can go a long way—without having to invest in advertising. Contact editors and establish relationships with them. Pitch ideas for stories that will interest their reading audience. Distribute press releases. Public relations is a bit of a long game, but it doesn’t have to be a budget-intensive activity.
8. Conduct Joint Marketing Programs
Collaborate with a partner in your industry that has complementary products and services to yours and develop a joint marketing program. You will be able to reach a broader audience (your partner’s as well as yours) and will only need to shoulder part of the costs.
9. Ask for More
If you’ve already been acting the savvy marketer and stretching your budget with decent results, why not take the bold step and just ask for more budget? This could work as long as you are able to demonstrate the return you are getting for current expenditures. This is yet another reason to use measurable digital marketing programs and always track performance.
Bonus Tip: Work with Media Partners
Media partners such as GlobalSpec know your target audience well and know how to reach them. We can help you develop an integrated marketing program that makes best use of your budget based on your goals. We’re just a click away if you want to learn more.
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