Despite spending a hefty sum in expanding their online campaigns, direct marketing efforts, and lead generation campaigns, marketers often fail to make the most out of their budget. It takes a toll on companies that operate on a tight budget allocation and depend on immediate conversions rather than reaping the benefits of brand goodwill in the long run.
There are several ways you can lower your marketing costs without compromising on the efficacy or the quality of your campaign. Here are five strategies that are easy to adapt and improve your baseline.
Improve Your Customer Targeting Plans
Companies must know more about what their customers need and tailor their campaigns accordingly. Only then, can their marketing campaigns make an effective impact and effect the maximum possible value from their marketing dollars.
To improve customer targeting, you must gather data that gives a complete profile of your potential customer. These data include knowing who your best customers are, where they live, and what their interests are. As well, focus on the demographic profiles within your targeted territory. This helps assess areas where you could reach customers having the same demographics and interests as your best ones.
Several market research agencies have ready-made reports on zip-code-wise demographics that help identify areas to stress and concentrate on with your marketing efforts. You can also leverage your own sales data and prepare profiles for your best customers who convert the most. With your marketing campaigns, both digital and physical, your job would then be to reach out to people with the same types of profiles.
Having your best or ideal customer profiles ready also helps you understand what types of marketing channels you must explore. It helps you focus on channels that are cost-efficient and result in high ROAS.
Your objective should always be to optimize your channel-audience combination. An efficient customer targeting plan is always about reaching out to highly convertible customers through the channels they are most comfortable using.
Give Equal Emphasis on Retention and Acquisition
Marketers often become obsessed with customer acquisition. While it is vital to keep acquiring customers for sustainable growth, you must remember that it frequently costs five times more to acquire a customer than to retain an existing one.
Some studies show that even an increase of 5% in customer retention increases profit as high as 95%. Therefore, your marketing efforts must strike the right balance between your acquisition and retention strategies.
There is no reason a business should be active in the market and stop trying to acquire new customers. The acquisition is imperative for growth. It also helps to diversify your customer base. A diversified customer base protects businesses when one or multiple of their audience segments become weak in sales volume.
Retention efforts, on the other hand, help increase a customer’s LTV or lifetime value. Your marketing campaigns must help optimize the LTV by bringing your loyal customers back to you again and again.
Explore Organic Marketing Channels
As the name suggests, organic marketing strategies help generate traffic to your business through natural avenues rather than paid advertising or sponsored ad runs.
To give an idea of how cost-efficient organic marketing could be: organic search drives 53% of website traffic, while paid search drives only 27%. It not only brings traffic, but it also helps bring convertible traffic resulting in the improvement of your baseline.
According to studies, B2B and technology companies generate twice as much revenue from organic search than any other marketing channel.
There are ways to build a comprehensive organic marketing strategy. Build permanent sources of traffic to improve conversion. These sources include content and assets hosted on your website, guest or influencer posts, and social media posts with their links to your website. Build your website’s content library. Also, it is crucial to optimize your website by ensuring that each page has metadata and the pages are responsive and designed with mobiles in mind.
Ensuring that your social media posts get good organic traction is a matter of optimizing the combination of the platform, post type, links used, and the schedule of posting.
Leverage Digital Marketing Automation Tools
Marketing automation tools help you get the best results possible without spending heavily on repetitive tasks and increased resources for campaign management. Such software and tools help you automate your email campaigns, shopping cart notifications, reports, A/B testing, and more.
You can design the exact email template you want without having the necessary technical or HTML knowledge. The tools also help in designing workflows, personalization of emails, and subscription forms.
Some tools help you track your performance and test different versions of your campaigns. Diverse sales, customer service, and CRM solutions give you an end-to-end picture of the entire interaction you have with potential leads and existing customers. The tools also help you schedule your communications along with monitoring them for their open rates, click-through rates, and deliverability.
When it comes to PPC marketing, there are automation platforms as well. For example, PromoNavi allows you to automate your routine tasks, such as keyword research, competitor analysis, reporting, analytics, optimization, alerts, etc. The pros are that you can link your PPC accounts to this platform to get valuable insights, perform actions in bulk, and save budget spend and time needed for PPC management.
That is why it is always prudent to explore these tools to save time by making your process repetition-free and less human resource intensive.
Conduct Marketing Audits at Regular Intervals
Marketers often end up shelling out more money than required because they fail to take stock of their campaign’s performance at regular intervals. It is important to compartmentalize your spending among different processes and check how much you are spending on each of them and how much return on investment they are offering you.
These segments may include content creation and promotion, social media ads management, email marketing efforts, print media advertisements, promotion of video ads, remarketing or retargeting efforts, SEO efforts, etc.
Segmentation makes it easier to reach the core of non-performance. You get to know the components where your campaign is underperforming. It’s easier to alter that one component than trying to modify the entire campaign structure.
Imply these approaches into your day-to-day practice, and you will notice that your marketing costs become lower!
