When it comes to marketing, there is of course no “one fits all” solution.
Some companies think that the more money they throw at their marketing activities, the better they will perform.
However, this kind of approach usually leads to wasted money on needless marketing activities.
In this article, you’ll learn five ways to stop wasting your marketing budget and how to start maximising it.
- Use smart marketing tools
Digital marketers live by their tools of the trade.
We have many amazing tools available at our disposal.
These tools let us be in a million places at once, whether it’s analysing social presence, or digging through visitors’ data – marketing tools can save us time and help us make critical marketing decisions.
Some tools are ideal for SMEs. Some tools are suitable for big organizations.
If your budget allowed, you may be tempted to invest in every digital marketing tool out there.
That would turn out to be a costly mistake.
A few smart marketing tools are enough to help you get great returns from your marketing campaigns.
Here are some smart marketing tools you should be using:
Ahrefs: It helps your site performs better on search engines by providing you with SEO insights like telling you why competitors are ranking so high on search engines, and what you should do to outrank them.
Buffer: It’s a social media management tool that helps you schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google Plus.
Crazy Egg: This is a heat and scroll map tool that tells you where people are clicking and seeing on your website.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free): This tool detects any element on your website that might be preventing it from ranking higher on search engines.
MailChimp (free for new businesses): This is an email marketing service that helps you send better emails to prospects and customers.
Google Analytics (free): This tool from Google lets you track and measure the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.
Google Search Console (free): This is a free service from Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.
Google AdWords: This platform helps you show your ads on Google Search results and Google partner’s sites. You pay for each click.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner (free): This tool helps you discover and compare keywords that will drive relevant traffic to your website.
Facebook Power Editor (It’s free and for businesses that want to advertise on Facebook): Power Editor is a Facebook advertising tool that helps businesses create, edit and publish multiple ads at once and have precise control of their campaigns.
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Sumo List Builder: This tool helps you collect prospects’ email addresses on your website.
- A/B test your paid ads
A/B testing is another word for experimenting in the digital marketing world.
Today, almost every leading digital companies conduct A/B testing on a regular basis.
Advertising is one of the major places many companies, small or big, spend most of the marketing budgets.
Digital ad spending is increasing.
In fact, forecasters estimate it to grow by 40% and reach $247 billion by the end of 2019.
If you’re advertising online, you shouldn’t be too confident that your ads are performing as well as they could until you’ve done a series of A/B tests.
A small change in your ad could improve your click-through rate and have a big positive impact on your business.
For example, if you’re advertising on Google AdWords, reducing the length of your headline could lead to higher click-through and vice versa.
A/B test your Facebook ads.
Test every aspect of your ad copy.
Test a short ad copy versus a long ad copy.
Test an image ad versus a video ad.
Test colorful versus light ad images. The below screenshot of a Squarespace ad on Facebook is a perfect example.
Test everything in your advertising.
A tiny change could lead to a big rise in revenue.
- Try retargeting
Ninety-six percent of people who land on your website are not ready to buy.
And just because they are not ready to buy the moment they visited your website doesn’t mean they can’t later become customers.
If these people have taken the time to visit your website, it means they are probably interested in your product or service.
Bringing some visitors to your website for the first time means you’ve spent some money on your marketing budget.
Instead of losing those 96% visitors who are not ready to buy, you can use retargeting to bring them back to your website and convert them into customers.
Sometimes, the best people to target are those who have either visited your website more than once or have digitally interacted with your business before.
That is what retargeting does.
It helps you maximise your marketing budget and grow your business.
- Invest in training your staff
An under-performing employee could consistently make mistakes, provide poor service, or just struggle in their role.
Also, the system, tactic or strategy an employee uses could have become old-fashioned or outdated.
These things could directly or indirectly hurt your marketing budget.
Digital marketing is an ever-changing field.
Your employees need access to constant marketing training.
Training your staff will help them work more efficiently and keep your company on the competitive edge.
In turn, each employee’s performance will improve, and you’ll get a better return on your marketing investment.
Uniform, a Liverpool based consultancy doubled in size and added £1.5 million to its revenue as a result of training its staff.
You shouldn’t just rely on an employee to do great work.
Take charge of your marketing by giving your employees the best training they need to flourish in their roles.
- Optimise your old blog posts
If you’re blogging on a regular basis, I’m sure your company is receiving some traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
Optimise those old blog posts that are receiving traffic from search engines by making them better.
For example, you can optimise an old blog post by including a keyword in its title or adding more images or content to improve the post.
Search engines will notice the change and may reward you with higher rankings in their search results. That means more traffic from search engines.
David Schneider, the co-founder of Ninja Outreach did this, and his organic search traffic increased by over 40%.
If you’ve installed Google Search Console and Google Analytics on your website, both tools will tell you which pages are receiving the most traffic.
Select the best-performing pages and make them even better.
You’ll notice a traffic increase from search engines.
And that leads to more customers for your business.
The content you’ve published on your blog could be optimised to acquire more customers.
What other ways can you maximise your SME marketing budget?
Share your views with me in the comment section.
Thanks for reading.
