As a marketer, you’re likely all too familiar with having to make the most of your budget. The amount you get is what you have to work with for the entire year. Because of this, you and your team likely feel strapped more often than not. At this same time, this is when your creative juices can flow as you aim to get the most bang for your buck.
It can be difficult to know which of your strategies should receive the most of your marketing dollars. Prioritization is key, especially as you plan for a new calendar year. Another key is looking at what is currently working and what isn’t giving you a great return on investment. If you’re unsure of which marketing strategies are worthy of your attention and your budget, keep reading. Here are five marketing strategies that you should prioritize and give more budget to.
1. Demand Generation
As a business, your main goal is generating interest. No matter what kind of product or service you are selling, you need to create awareness and demand. One of the best ways to do this is through demand generation. This marketing tactic pulls together marketing, sales, and customer service to drive interest for your company.
Demand generation is similar to lead generation, however, there are some differences. While demand generation propels your growth, lead generation focuses on conversions. A well-thought-out demand-generation strategy will increase brand interest and improve leads. It will also lead to higher retention rates, allowing you to continue to resell to your current customer pool.
2. Complementary Strategies
A great way to get more bang for your buck is to focus on efforts that complement each other. As any good marketer knows, putting all of your eggs in one basket is risky. Let’s say that your team focuses solely on a splashy social campaign. Even if this one effort gains a significant amount of leads, it isn’t sustainable. At some point, the campaign will reach its ending point, and you’ll be stuck with an outdated campaign.
By investing in strategies that complement each other, your efforts and your dollars will go further. For instance, investing in good content marketing will boost your search engine optimization. While investing in your SEO strategy will help you develop good content marketing and eventually drive more leads.
3. Co-marketing
It’s no secret that today’s world is quite competitive. New businesses are popping up every day, and many are seeking audiences similar to yours. Instead of fighting against each other all the time, you may want to consider working together. This is called co-marketing, and it can be lucrative for both businesses.
When pairing up with another company, think about your end goal. If you are launching a new product, you may want to collaborate on its creation of it. This can easily be done via social media through the co-creation and promotion of Instagram posts and videos. As both companies promote the launch together, you both will gain new audiences. This can help in the short-term for selling the new product, but also in the long-term via audience leads.
4. Content Distribution
Your content is only as successful as the marketing behind it. Even if your team creates the most stellar content unless eyeballs are seeing it, it’s essentially worthless. Publishing your content and forgetting about it isn’t going to help generate leads or awareness. Alongside this, content also needs to have longevity in order for it to remain valuable. This is why investing in content distribution can be advantageous.
A piece of content can live long after its publication date. An interview or Q&A article with your company’s founder can be broken down and distributed into various marketing tactics. For example, you can take a quote from the piece and post it on social media. Or, you can include a snippet in a weekly e-newsletter. This content can be leveraged for other PR pieces, allowing you to get the founder’s story out there and distributed via notable publications.
5. Conduct Customer Research
Lastly, if you haven’t done customer research in a while, it may be worth the investment. Audiences, attitudes, and preferences change constantly. Their needs, desires, and wishes are dependent on the season but also on the market. And due to today’s economic situation, more and more consumers are thinking twice about what they are spending their money on.
Conducting customer research can benefit your marketing tactics for the upcoming year. As you listen to their feedback, you will learn what is working and what isn’t working from a marketing standpoint. You will also get a better sense of your customer’s experience and what you can improve upon. If customer research is out of your wheelhouse, you can utilize specific customer research tools and platforms to help.
Takeaways
Marketing is ever-evolving. What works one time isn’t going to necessarily work the next. As you plan out your marketing strategies, think about how to get the most out of each tactic. You may need to spend more in some areas than others, depending on your goals and company needs. Keep these five strategies in mind as you evaluate your current marketing plan and think about the future.
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