Making the Most of Your Marketing Budget

Businesses don’t have unlimited marketing budgets so we are always looking for how to get the biggest return on our marketing investment. If you’re a small business, this is especially true as you may only have a couple hundred dollars to spend on marketing. Follow these four marketing budget tips to get a solid return on investment (ROI) on your marketing efforts:
Be focused
Take the time to do the research into who is in your target market. By only investing in advertising to your target market you will spend less money in a more strategic way. The more refined you can make your target market the better your ROI will likely be. When defining your audience consider things like age, location, job title, income, industry, buying history, media they consume and education. Not all of those audience items will be relevant to you, but you should try to narrow it down as much as possible.
Create a referral program
Let your customers be your advertisers. Create a referral program that rewards current customers for bringing new customers to your business. Word-of-mouth marketing is also very powerful; it is the most trusted form of advertising with consumers putting the most trust in recommendations from friends and family. This blog gives some examples of tactics that you might want to use when launching your own referral marketing campaign.
Don’t forget PR
Press releases can be a good way of informing current customers and your industry about new products, services or big changes within your business. Press releases are pretty easy to produce and distribute with your internal talent. There are wire services to publish releases to and you can also target trade publications and send the release to them as well.
Prioritize email over print
Email marketing is a cost effective way of reaching current and potential customers. Over 90% of businesses find email marketing helpful to their organization. Email also has a very good ROI because of the low cost associated with sending emails. Put together an email marketing strategy and keep tweaking it until you find what works best for your business. The ROI is there if you put in the effort, with email marketing creating an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent. That same article contains 70 helpful stats that you should inform your email marketing.

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