Easy ways to cut marketing costs without hurting your sales
The revenue from your company’s marketing and sales is highly correlated. But that doesn’t mean companies with large marketing budgets generate more revenue – up to 30% of companies agree that setting a marketing budget is their biggest challenge. How much should you spend marketing your company? And how to reduce marketing costs?
According to the SBA, you should be spending 7 to 8% of total revenue on marketing if your company earns less than $ 5 million.If your company makes more money, you can spend up to 12% on marketing. But should you blindly follow these numbers?
Here are two situations that will help you get a better perspective.
Let’s say you receive 400 new leads per month with a market capitalization of $ 4,000, and every 1 in 16 of those leads will be sold. So your current marketing expense generates 25 sales per month, earning $ 50,000.
Considering the new sales proportions in the market, you have implemented all current marketing techniques. Continually raising your marketing budget will not increase your total income.
Marketing is expensive and results can vary by industry. According to recent events, Google has cut its marketing budget by 50%.
This begs the question: How can you reduce your marketing costs without affecting your sales or income? I’m going to show you five different ways to reduce marketing costs without harming your business.
Use free tools
Did you know Buffer only spends $ 3,000 on marketing tools?
Now, $ 3,000 is a lot, so the first point in cutting down on marketing costs is to get rid of that amount by using free marketing software tools in your business.
Many marketing tools are available for free. So the first step in reducing marketing costs is to use these tools for marketing activities like keyword research, banner design, publications, social media, and more!
Identify underperforming marketing channels For example, if your overall ranking and visibility go down, your competitors will need to take their SEO and SEM activities seriously.
Use free marketing tools like Google Keyword Planner & Ubersuggest to identify your competitor’s ranking page and find the right keywords to use in your blog.
Use organic marketing
Organic marketing such as SEO, SMM, and email marketing as common ways to promote your business to lead.
90% of online experiences begin with search, resulting in over 3.5 billion searches on Google daily.
With that in mind, organic marketing should be the # 1 way to lower your marketing costs without affecting your sales!
Tip: If you primarily rely on paid marketing for new leads, don’t stop immediately! General marketing takes time to show results. Gradually switch to organic marketing to reduce marketing costs.
Write a useful, keyword-appropriate blog. Send a weekly or monthly newsletter to your email list. Reach hundreds of thousands of famous website visitors related to your business to create more opportunities for your guests to post.
Replace your content with a new one.
Have you ever heard of 7 marketing rules?
It is said that potential customers will need to see, read or hear your company’s message (blog, video, podcast, etc.) 7 times to make a purchase decision. So how do you reduce your marketing costs when sending at least 7 messages?
One way to cut marketing costs that experts recommend is to reuse content.
Let’s say you’ve invested all your resources, time, and money into creating a video. Some of the content replacement options you can use, but not limited to:
Cut the original video to make a short video.
Conversion to podcasts
Create a blog in this video and offer it as a guest post or upload it as a blog on your site. Make a social media copy for the same blog.
Convert to eBook to share in your newsletter.
You now have 7 to 8 variations of the same content for your audience on different platforms. Reusing content is a proven method of lowering the marketing costs used by big brands and small businesses around the world.
Separate your budget wisely.
Each company has a marketing strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, it can cost you your marketing budget.
According to CoSchedule
Marketers with a well-documented strategy are 313% more likely to achieve their goals.
Once you have a strategy, what channels will you use to position your business?
In this marketing cost reduction phase, the idea is to categorize different marketing channels based on their ROI in the previous 3 quarters.
Once you’ve got your list, start skipping the channels with the lowest / lowest ROI from the list below.
When you cross all channels with no chance of earning rewards even in the long run, you can get a marketing budget that is suitable for your company.This is one of the most effective ways to reduce your marketing costs.
Look for the areas with the greatest impact on your business.. Eliminate marketing channels with minimal ROI, avoid experimenting with new marketing channels when there is a way to reduce marketing costs.
Increase sales for your current customers.
It is now common knowledge that it is easier to increase sales to existing customers than to acquire new customers. Here are two statistics, with Fundera 65% of the company’s business comes from existing customers. It costs five times more to acquire a customer than to retain a customer. Marketing plays an important role in customer retention. When looking for ways to reduce marketing costs, be sure to significantly reduce the strategies and channels you use to retain customers.
Share new case studies, e-books, videos, and more to keep your customers engaged with your company.If you’re launching a new service, let consumers know and offer discounts that fit your business model.
Experts also recommend doing quarterly checks on your clients. Not only that But it will help you, as a service provider, better understand your customers’ needs. But also make your customers feel valued.
The idea of increasing sales to existing customers is to add lifelong customer value to your business.
Last word
It’s important to cut marketing costs without hurting your business, especially during tough times.
What are you doing to balance your company’s marketing spending?