As a business owner it can be a daunting task to create a marketing strategy, choose where to spend your marketing budget and decide which of the many different marketing activities to focus your efforts.
It’s important to note that your marketing budget is an investment, not an expense. It should fuel growth, not just give your brand visibility. Ultimately your marketing activity must help you reach your business goals: whether that’s the acquisition of new customers, retention of existing customers, or another objective entirely, and that is why a strategy or plan is so important.
With the option of so many different marketing methods — and a limited budget to spend on each — it’s difficult to know where to start. But if you’re keen to get started with an effective campaign, there are still plenty of options out there that are worth considering.
We recommend investing in tools that will help you understand your business and audience whilst giving you the best return. Here are just a few of the best places for small businesses to focus their marketing budgets:
Get the foundations right: While it would be easy to jump right in and spend your budget on the ‘fun stuff’ like social media, new graphics, or videos, this may not be the best course of action. It’s critical to get the basics right, investing time and money in developing a marketing plan that works for you and ensuring you’ve laid a firm basis on which to build is key. A smart marketing strategy will allow you to put your best foot forward while also indicating where the rest of your budget should be spent.
Formulating a marketing strategy might sound like a costly exercise but it doesn’t have to be! Many marketing experts (including ourselves!) offer no-obligation consultations that can point you in the right direction.
Run a branding workshop: There is more to a brand than graphics and colour combinations. Your brand is the collective understanding of the organisation by its customers, employees, investors and everyone else its marketing communications touch; what they see, hear and read about your firm, including your products and services. So, a branding workshop would be a wise investment. This will give everyone in the business a better understanding of the brand’s values and, as a result, be better at selling your products and services.
Once you have a marketing strategy in place and an understanding of your brand, then it is time to allocate some budget to create content that your target audience can engage with. Whilst there are many different types of content to create, the previous two steps will allow you to focus on the platforms that your target market is more active on. When you’re not creating content for every platform, you can adapt and focus your messaging on the ones where your audience is actually hanging out. Social media content, creating videos and blogs can all cost money, so whilst you’re not posting everywhere…you’re posting where it matters.
There’s a lot to think about when it comes to your market budget, but as with all areas of business spending, you should be able to monitor your progress. Every penny should help you grow your business and by monitoring this, you can easily spot if there is a disconnect in the strategy and adapt efficiently. This will allow you to save the business both time and money.