How to Build and Maximize Your Marketing Budget

There are many great marketing tactics that marketers can invest in, but every marketer needs to be conscious about getting the most value from their marketing investments. Not every marketing tactic costs money! A common mistake many businesses make is they look at their marketing budget as their marketing plan. They assign dollars to line items and execute their "plan" according to how much money has been allocated to each line item. This often happens because there is no overall business strategy. Marketing activities become more of a reaction to specific needs. Need more leads? Spend more on marketing. Pipeline looks good, pull back.

Instead of thinking about budgets, businesses need to better understand their buyer's journey and what's required to help them move to a sale. Recognizing the end goal and the steps to get there will inform you as to the right marketing tactics that will help the business achieve its goals. Most importantly, ensure that you have a consistent approach to your marketing program and not just turn on and off the faucet in an attempt to generate leads on-demand. Having disconnected tactics in your marketing plan can waste time, money, and effort and slow your progress.

How Important is Consistency in Your Marketing Plan?

Melissa Forziat emphasizes that consistency is important when looking at the company's  marketing plan. In her own business, she drops weekly newsletters that contain various marketing tips and advice. When the time is right, prospects reach out to hear to engage because she has delivered value over time. She remains top of mind without having to invoke high pressure sales tactics or expensive marketing campaigns. It has proven that content strategy and marketing investments do pay off when consistently deployed over time. But it does take time before the marketing efforts convert into leads and ultimately sales. Generating quick interest is possible but it's often very expensive because you're hoping to catch buyers who have already made the decision to buy. It's less about education and influence than catching someone who is already pulling out their wallet.

Building trust and creating that emotional connection with your potential buyers is what pays dividends in the long run. It's important to remember that every email being sent out is not going to be opened and read, so if you just send out one or two emails, you're really rolling the dice that those two messages will be the ones that a prospect opens up. However, making the effort to stay top of mind make a difference. Melissa notes that it is essential to remember that businesses really shouldn't count themselves out just because a potential customer did not make a purchase immediately from your outreach efforts. You never know how strong the impact you're making through the content you are creating. When the prospect is ready, they'll often be back if you're continually providing value. HubSpot Blog shares with us the seven essential benefits of having a consistent and high quality content strategy:

1. Increases audience retention
2. Better social media traction
3. Establish trust with your audience
4. Generate leads
5. Improves your conversions
6. Enhances your SEO efforts
7. Builds your brand authority

Marketing Automation Tools on a Budget

While marketing is certainly an expense, businesses don't necessarily have to strain their budgets by investing a lot in marketing automation technology or content tools. There are many free tools that  can be integrated into your marketing programs. It's often a good idea to try new tools before purchasing to see how they fit into your workflow. Of course, nearly every business needs to have a good website as their digital home on the internet. Spending money to create an attractive and informative web presence is an important first step. As you begin to create additional content, look into tools that have free versions. This can be a cost effective way to incorporate new tools and technologies on a budget until you've outgrown the limitations of the free version. For example, Canva is a great tool for creating graphics and it offers a powerful free version. HubSpot is a marketing automation tool that also offers a free CRM that supports email lists. Buffer is a social media management tool and offers a robust free version. And the list goes on. Just don't fall into the trap of buying or subscribing to a bunch of tools before you know if they're really going to make a positive impact on your marketing strategy. It can get expensive quickly and end up increasing the complexity of your workflow!

For many businesses, the primary goal of their marketing strategy is brand awareness. According to Forziat, there are many ways for a company to build awareness and not all of them cost money. For example, a company can take advantage of earned media opportunities, such as getting interviewed or featured on a podcast or quoted in a article. Getting these opportunities helps maximize the marketing budget but does requirement some effort. In a previous Masterclass episode, we shared strategies for building out a PR and communications strategy. For Melissa, a good marketing plan, especially if your marketing budget is tight, involves looking at your business from different angles and understanding what tactics can be most effective and easy on the budget.

The Importance of Having a Good Website

Melissa believes that a company's website is a critical piece of the marketing mix for most businesses. Having some sort of a website presence is important, especially when the business plans to do a lot of online marketing. This means a dedicated website, not a Facebook page or site hosted within another platform. You want to drive people to the company's page and own the interaction with your prospects. Companies can support their website with free or low-cost tools and use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to help bring in traffic. Companies don't have to spend a large portion of their marketing budget to gain visibility if the make the effort to maximize what free tools and platforms can offer.

Lead Generators

Melissa shares that she is a big believer in finding a way to have lead generators and an opt-in's on your website because regardless of how many people are visiting your sites, when people show up on a company's website, they are anonymous. You have no idea who they are unless they take action. If you offer something of value or a promotion like a time-limited deal, you have an opportunity to collect their contact information, Getting a prospect's contact information enables you to build email lists and follow-up with prospects by offering them additional information or offers. Melissa highlights the five tools she considers to be helpful for lead generation - websites, blogs, newsletters, social media, and lead magnets.

Medium lists the eight major reasons why a website is essential for your business' success:

1. Online identity is crucial to success
2. It helps with market expansion
3. Adds value to your company and satisfaction to your audience
4. Great means of advertising
5. Offers relevant content and external links
6. Gives you a growth opportunity
7. Your website's functionality can be changed
8. Easier integration of your other marketing platforms and systems

Website - Your Digital Home

In this digital world, the Yellow Pages are a thing of the past. People don't look to a physical book to find resources. They're online, they're researching things on the web, and they're visiting various website. It's important to have a fresh and modern-looking website to keep a potential customer interested in your content. A website doesn't need to be large with lots of pages, it could just be a page or two but it needs to reflect a level of professionalism. Businesses must strive to make people feel comfortable and confident about the brand whenever they visit the company site or social media accounts. Unprofessional emails or poorly constructed websites can be a turn-off. It's worth the investment to make sure your content is well written and attractively presented.

Melissa points out that a major red flag is when businesses send emails from domains other than a business domain. Have you ever received a response from a small business sent from an AOL or Yahoo account? It reflects poorly on the business and shows a lack of professionalism. Make sure  you take the time to have a proper domain setup for your business and that your emails come only from the company domain.

Conclusion

Marketing is a cost center within a business but that doesn't mean that everything done to support a marketing plan needs to be costly. There are many tactics that can be implemented at a relatively low cost that still can be very effective. Using free tools gives businesses the opportunity to "try before you buy" and sometimes, you may find the free version is sufficient for your needs. Social platforms provide ways to raise brand awareness and publicize your offering for no cost, and investing efforts in getting earned media can help drive awareness with much expense. There's no doubt that for most businesses to scale, not everything can be done for free. A wise investment in marketing tools and tactics can have a big payoff for many businesses. It's also true that "free" doesn't always mean no cost. The investment of time and effort also needs to be factored into investment decisions. One thing is a certain, however, for every business, owning their home on the internet is important and having a professional, modern website is essential and worth an investment.