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Champagne Marketing on a Beer Budget – How to Prioritize Your Marketing Budget
Whether you’re just starting out or hitting a bump in your financial road, there will come a time when resources are limited, and time is of the essence. This is exactly why companies need to master the skill of doing more marketing with less. Well, we do love a challenge. So here’s our advice on how to prioritize your marketing budget when you have Budweiser money for Veuve taste.
1. Your Website
No surprise as to our #1, but key to any online marketing strategy is your company’s website. Even done simply, it will serves as a hub of information related to your brand, products and services. Think of your web site is your company’s front door, and one of your most valuable sales and marketing tools to attract new clients, while keeping existing clients engaged. Enough Said!
2. Online Advertising/SEO
Once you’ve built your business website, your goal is to drive online traffic (people) to it. Sending online visitors to your website is like inviting real people to walk into your store to check-out what you’re offering. If they don’t step in, they can’t really know what you’re company’s all about, and how you could help them solve their problems or pain points.
The short-term strategy to drive traffic to your website is to create an online advertising campaign (think Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and banner ads) in one or more platforms. This is the fastest way to get people to find you, get to know you and get acquainted with what you’ve got to offer.
In the mid to long-term, your strategy should focus on optimizing your website (SEO - which involves various online marketing services) to help you rank higher on Google so that your prospective clients can find your business in any natural web search results. This will help increase your company’s brand perception, overall competitive ranking, and help you decrease the amount of money you need to spend on advertising to promote your website.
3. Social Media Presence
Ok, so you’ve hit #1 and #2….now it’s time to devote more time and money into your social media presence. Your employees are on social networks. Your customers are on social networks. Your shareholders are on social networks. Your nimble, startup competitors are on social networks. If you're not on these social networks, you not only risk looking like you're out of touch, you risk actually becoming out of touch.
If you haven’t set up your social media pages (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn) for your company, then get a move on! If you have, pat yourself on the back. BUT, our guess is that you probably haven’t spent the time to professionally manage it in order to engage your target audience.
In order to have an effective social media campaign you must devote a lot of time to it (or hire a professional company or strategist to help you). Start as you mean to go on. Basically, don’t start unless you’re willing to commit to the “doing” part. If you’re merely going to set up social media profiles and then do nothing with them, that’s a reason to avoid social media altogether. Warren Buffett first tweeted on May 2nd, 2013. He has tweeted a grand total of six times since then. He’s also not following a single other Twitter user.
5. Content Marketing, Blogs
Content Marketing refers to the development of content such as articles, blog posts, press releases, white papers, tips and guides, etc which showcase you and your company as the “expert” of your professional field. Writing and creating such content helps your business to not only “say what you offer”, but rather to “show what you’re offering”.
Given that you are reading this from a website blog, it will come as no surprise how we feel about blogging. Why are we such fans? Well, it’s relatively simple and inexpensive way for you to become an authoritative figure in your industry.
By showing that you’re an expert (via a blog or e-mail campaign), rather than just saying you are one (through your regular website) you’ll be better able to convince a potential client that you have the skills and expertise required to actually perform and complete the promises your products/services offer.
