Use Your Budget Strategically and Make an Impact
There are comments from marketing specialists of various sorts that companies don’t spend their budgets wisely. They complain that insufficient funds are invested in their particular discipline.
Marketing budgets are often meager and insufficient to make impact. Although many startups are said to spend 10% to 20% of revenue on marketing yet competitive, quality content can be costly to produce. Many businesses don’t invest big in marketing until they’re ready. That’s smart. Understand your market deeply first, know your market strategy, sharpen your UVP, then begin in earnest.
In this post, we explore big impact marketing strategy, but still using marketing dollars wisely. Impact is the missing ingredient.
Some won’t commit to marketing until their first big sales success, because then they’ve got the money. But just because you’ve got the money doesn’t mean you should use it loosely. You must have the preliminaries established. You may need adjustments like new services, product improvements and skilled marketers to get you up to speed, or develop solid marketing collateral before that launch.
So if marketing funds are not being committed or allocated properly, it could mean you’re not ready. In the meantime, funds are needed to get you prepared for the big times ahead.
Divvying up the Budget Pie
Everyone wants a piece of that pie of course and they have their views on how the budget should be spend in marketing activities. Ultimately, it’s the owner and marketing manager who decide what will work and where funds will go. From experience, I know funds are allocated in a strange way. Often, it’s spent on wages when labor isn’t the ultimate weapon for success. Sometimes it’s advertising only yet the product/service/brand isn’t ready yet. Sometimes it’s just caution with no real reason.
On occasion, some clients will spend way too much on something. That’s not wise. We need to be hard headed and ensure the expense will bring results. Marketing dollars are precious.
If we’re going to criticize how funds are invested we have to prove how our contribution will create the ROI needed. In many cases, those services are nice to haves but not always must haves. Some services are high quality, but without the full marketing effort, they can’t create impact.
The Road to Impact: Create Starter Wins
We know from Facebook and Google’s $100 billion dollar windfall where most of the marketing funds are going. And ppc spending is unwise if again, you’re not ready to engage and convert those visitors. Yet, you do need to build your marketing power. There is a strategy that help you get some quick results. Let’s call them starter wins.
Turns out, you can invest your marketing dollars more wisely in starter campaigns that let you test out everything, get valuable feedback, refine alignment, and discover what works. Chances are, many things will work if you can get reach and make an impact on your audience.
The key which I’ve described in posts involves strategy and blitz marketing techniques. The gist of the strategic approach is that funds are spent exactly where they’re needed to generate enough impact to force the situation. Your target audience will get engaged with your offer and you’ll find out if it’s a winner. Learning now is better than learning later.
If you surf on over to Content Marketing Institute, their surveys suggest content marketing and SEO are the preferred and cost effective channels. After collecting emails, email campaigns might work, and Facebook can build familiarity and engagement. The only cost will be paychecks and any resources needed. Everyone is doing it, and they seem to be satisfied?
Yes, web design and apps are vital too if you’re selling online products and subscriptions. But if it looks like you’ll run out of money building your website and apps, then shifting to marketing is smarter. If you have enough of a product/service to offer, then launch your marketing with full force. SEO, Content Strategy, email, and social media are fine, but they don’t generate enough impact. You can ace them and live in a world of mediocrity for a long time. They’re definitely the core of a smart approach.
But what elevate your marketing campaign are intense blitz campaigns.
Focused, Time-Limited Impact
An agency I worked for once spent hundreds of thousands on billboards, digital banner ads, and celebrity boosted radio ads on a blitz campaign. It didn’t generate the sales results desired but they learned a little. It didn’t compete with my SEO results but it could be the blitz was just something that I couldn’t achieve — making a loud multimedia impact to generate emotion.
And yes, even advanced SEO strategy isn’t enough, but when combined with blitz campaigns, it can make them much more effective. Customers are always searching and if your site has omnipresence with wide keyword rankings, customers get the idea you’re everywhere and therefore must be important. It’s constant reminders just like an ad.
The Real Value of a Blitz Campaign
Blitzes force you to get strategic, focused, capture attention and make an impact. The idea is that you must make a significant emotional impact before any prospect will act. It’s not that they don’t see you or like your product. It could be amazing, just as compelling as the market leader. But to beat the market leader’s branding and grip on audiences, you need big impact.
A blitz marketing strategy is an advanced technique. It sounds loud and loose, yet it’s tightly integrated to blow the competition out of the way for a short period so every becomes engaged in your value proposition. You need to come out with guns ablazing and make your competitors look weak and insignificant. Aggression works. And so does military precision. Learn more about military style marketing techniques and the campaign a California company used to generate huge million dollar wins. Their problems went away.
The big blitz creates impact for your whole marketing mix, not just sales. SEO gets a needed boost when bloggers, journalists and other people see your campaign and interesting collateral and talk about it, share it, and link to your website. They didn’t feel compelled before but the “event” caught their imagination and they responded by sharing with their world.
The blitz is a short intense event, so you won’t be spending as much as a protracted drip campaign. Campaigns need to hit the market and wake everybody up. It’s a sleepy, yet noisy marketplace where consumers ignore advertising.
Having excellent content and a superb conversion funnel pathway and solid closing tactics is super. But impact is the event that activates the sleepy world of prospects.
No one marketing channel can do it all by itself. A coordinated, dynamic experience is needed. Hopefully your marketing manager has the experience, and draft the strategy and execute it. If not, there is likely a specialist who can guide you to put it together. It often does take work and planning to craft the big idea for a blitz, inspiration for the right content, and courage to spend the money when you’re ready.
Some would say this isn’t brain science, but actually if you’re aiming to go up against the market leaders, then it better be really good. If you’ve saved money via email, SEO and social media, then commit those funds to the blitz campaign and get things moving. Even if you fail, you’ll learn a lot. More than likely, the experience will launch your marketing to a whole new level.
It will force you to upgrade your strategy, techniques, content, and your UVP, because the market will tell you what’s wrong. Don’t get all balled up in pride, because this is how we learn.
If you have an insufficient marketing budget, then you need a financier or money partner. You can’t succeed without money in the Facebook/Google era. They’ve got us by the throat and no one’s coming to the rescue. Only you can turn up the heat of your campaigns.
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