Marketing Budgets — What To Cut & What To Keep

Those big marketing budget decisions just got a whole lot easier if you want record breaking results in 2019 to grow your business. Check out this handy guide to help you decide what marketing you should be doubling down on and what you need to dump.

It’s still early in the New Year and while most returned to the office renewed and refreshed, there was one question being asked throughout January, over and over:

‘What marketing strategies should we be looking to invest more in this year and in what areas should we be looking to pull back?”.

At the end of the day, what you’re trying to achieve is the best Return on Investment possible and to grow your business faster than ever before.

To get started, let’s look at the top strategies you need to be doing less of (or cutting out completely).

Originally the local pack appeared down below the organic listings and showed 7 businesses:

1. High Cost Per Lead/Cost Per Acquisition

The first thing you should look to cut in 2019 is anything that has a comparatively high cost per lead or cost per acquisition.

Let me show you what I mean:

Let’s say you get traffic and leads from…..

• Organic Search
• Paid Search
• Display Ads, and
• Social Ads

Take a look at how much your cost per lead is on all your channels.

By example, you might find your Organic Search is $20 per lead, your Display Ads are $23 and your Paid Search may even be as high as $30.  But you see your Social Leads are $65 per lead…and the quality isn’t that great.

Is the QUALITY, the CONTEXT and CONVERSATION RATE of those leads significantly higher than the leads from other channels?

If not:

• think about the opportunity cost of allocating so much budget toward that channel…and
• think about what it might look like to allocate some more of that budget to some of those other channels or strategies that have a lower cost per acquisition.

In an example like that, we would recommend cutting back on the Social Advertising and reinvesting that budget into the channels that have a better cost acquisition.

While that’s just an example, the point is you want to find out what your cost per lead is from each channel.

Pull budget AWAY from the high cost per lead channel, and put it TOWARDS the lower cost per lead channels to get a better return on investment on your marketing budget in 2019.

2. Anything you can’t track

Back in the 80’s or even the 90’s, doing advertising you couldn’t track was really your only option.

As the old saying goes:

The reason was that in a world of TV, radio, newspapers and Yellow Pages, there really wasn’t an effective way to specifically track where your leads where coming from.

Then the internet happened, and all of a sudden you were able to track the performance of every single dollar that you spent on advertising and work out exactly what turned into a positive return on your investment and what didn’t.

This process of tracking and measuring everything led to a process of continual improvement, where every single dollar that you spend on online advertising should teach you something. It should teach you:

• Something about what worked, or
• Something about what didn’t work.

Therefore, if you’re doing it properly, your return on your digital advertising spend should continue to go up and up and up over time.

However, if you are still doing traditional advertising that you can’t track or measure, then you really don’t learn anything about what worked and what didn’t. You’re left scratching your head while you competitors are doubling down in digital advertising, keep improving their return on investment every single month.

By example, say you spend 50% of your marketing budget that you can track really well. You put the other 50% into TV, radio, newspaper and other traditional channels.

• The return that you get from the 50% of the budget that you put into digital marketing is going to continue to improve, month on month on month.
• Meanwhile, with the other 50% that you put into traditional advertising, who know what is happening?

If you have a marketing budget the size of:

…and you want to invest into traditional advertising like TV, radio and newspaper to help with BRAND AWARENESS, then go for it.

However, if you’re a small to medium business who needs to maximise the number of leads you generate every single month from your marketing budget, then you should only be putting money into budget on the things you can track.

WHY?

• It’s 2019, and I don’t care who your audience is or how old they are, they are going to be connected to the internet, all day long.
• Any money that you spend on anything you can’t measure only makes it harder to know where you leads are coming from and decreases your overall return on investment.

This means, you should be doing more of the strategies that have.

1. Low cost per lead – the channels that get you the best leads at the lowest costs.

NOTE: If you’re not fully capitalising on those opportunities, then it’s recommended that you double down on those strategies and improve on the return on investment that you are already getting.

2. Doing more of the strategies that you can track.

That might seem overly simple, but I want to show you how doing just those two things could double and even triple the sales leads that come into your business over the next 12 months.

Example #1: Double Down on Low Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Strategies

Firstly, to keep it simple, let’s say your marketing budget is split just two ways Let’s say you total marketing spend is $10,000. You spend:

• Google Adwords – $5,000
• Banner ads on a highly relevant industry website – $5,000

Imagine your Google Adwords campaign delivers you 50 leads a month. We take the $5,000 spend and divide it by the 50 leads. That’s an average cost per lead of about $100.

Let’s say for the same investment of $5,000 a month, your industry website is delivering you 5 leads per month. That’s $5,000 divided by 5 leads, which equals $1,000 cost per lead.

If you only made one change to your marketing strategy this year:

Step 1: Take the $5,000 that you invested in the high cost per leave strategy of the industry website

Step 2: Reinvest it into the low cost per lead strategy using Google Adwords.

THE RESULT: You would end up getting an additional 45 leads every single month. That’s an additional 540 leads per year – WITH NO ADDITIONAL SPEND!

Example #2: Doubling Down On What You Can Track

In this example, just to give you a different number, let’s assume you spend $20,000 per month

You spend:

• Digital Advertising  – $10,000 (That you can track)
• Traditional Advertising – $5,000 (That you cannot track)

Let’s assume that on your digital spend, your cost per lead was $100, meaning for your $10,000 investment, you would getting about 100 leads per month. That’s 1,200 leads per year.

Rather than put that $10,000 into Print Advertising every month this year, and hoping that more people saw it than last year, instead, reinvest into digital activities where you know your cost per lead is $100.

Straight away, you pick up an additional $1,200 leads for no extra spend.

Those our the recommendations for how to get the most out of your marketing budgeting for 2019.

What tips did you find useful? Drop Bambrick Media a note or contact a strategist here.