5 ways to optimize a small marketing budget

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn, I was marketing manager for a buying and marketing group of 250 independent retailer stores of in-vehicle electronics and accessories. We learned a crucial lesson from the recession and its eventual recovery: Don’t stop promoting your business. Never. Don’t stop, even when your resources are low.

If you have a small marketing budget, you need to be smart about priorities. In this article, I’ll share some things I’ve learned along the way to help small businesses get the most out of their small marketing budgets.

Tip #1: Have a marketing budget

A $0 marketing budget cannot be stretched. I’ve worked with small businesses that historically didn’t allocate any resources to marketing, and no one is surprised to learn that these retailers weren’t operating to their full potential.

Some retailers in our specialty retail industry, like many small businesses, have eliminated or significantly reduced their promotional budgets during the recession. I understand. Consumers stopped having disposable income and subsequently stopped buying as much stuff, so why throw money into what appears to be a burning pit of marketing materials? I’ll tell you why: because eventually people found new jobs, regained disposable income, and most importantly, started buying things again.

After the economy recovered (in most markets), retailers who stayed on message and remained promotional even when times were tough had a huge advantage over competitors who were waiting on the margins for conditions to improve. In some cases, our post-crash promotional retailers have defaulted to silent, non-promotional competitors and become the single voice of consumers in their market.

So fire up Excel and get spreadsheets.

Tip #2: Choose a social property and do it right

When Google+ was launched, I remember the collective panic expressed by the small business owners I worked with at the time. This same panic has been accompanied by the growing popularity of Instagram and Pinterest. I see it now with SnapChat. How will an already busy small business owner or marketer find the time and money to manage a gazillion social media business pages when they are struggling to promote one alone ?

Take a deep breath and stop panicking. Take a look at your resources and level up. Can you really get the results you want with social media if you try to be really good at all of them?

If your answer is no, I have good news for you. My proven recommendation is to pick 1 or 2 and get really good at it. When you focus your time and money on a streamlined social strategy, you can bring all those resources scattered across multiple properties and direct them into a more focused and streamlined strategy.

I can’t tell you which social network to choose because it depends on your business, but I will say that most B2C companies that follow my advice choose Facebook, Instagram or both, while most B2B companies choose Twitter then Facebook or LinkedIn. When everyone tells you to start advertising on SnapChat and you think your head might explode, you have my permission to say no. You’re welcome.

Tip 3: Pay to play on social networks (instead of believing that bio is enough)

Let’s say that after reading tip #2, you chose Facebook as the focus of your social strategy. Good choice, since Facebook is the most popular social network in the United States.

Well, the days of effective free advertising via Facebook business page posts are long gone. The good news is that Facebook advertising and boosted posts are very effective and very affordable.

Facebook boosted post information from Columbus car radioa specialty retailer with around 5,000 likes

The screenshot above shows the performance of a boosted post versus an unpaid post, and I think that speaks for itself. This boosted $30 message aired during a freak snowstorm to promote car remote start systems. No, I am not missing any zero my friends, that is to say thirty dollars. It reached 10,000 people, was clicked 531 times and received 55 comments. Yay for monstrous snowstorms!

However, you probably also noticed the post below, which was unboosted and only got 265 views and 5 engagements. They paid 30 times more for the boosted post than for the free, but they got 38 times the reach and 106 times the engagement.

Boosting posts isn’t the only way to pay to play on Facebook. Columbus Car Audio spends around $300-$500 per Facebook ad campaign and averages around 57 leads per campaign with a conversion rate of around 8%. Considering an average ticket for a 12 volt retailer is around $1500 (but usually higher!), they get a pretty healthy ROI from Facebook ads.

Now how about some good old fashioned anecdotal evidence to pile on top of those “stats” and “graphs”? When I asked the folks at Columbus Car Audio what they thought about paid social content versus organic social content, they said, “Anything paid definitely blows up organic posts. We believe that Facebook Ads are one of our most successful ad campaigns, and we significantly increased the campaign budget in 2016.” Thank you Columbus Car Audio for sharing your stats and success with the world!

Tip #4: Invest in Email Marketing and Destroy Direct Mail

Sometimes we do what we’ve always done because it’s safe and familiar and because we’ve always done it. I know of some businesses that still place ads in print phone books (apparently that’s still a thing) and others that still choose to invest in direct mail over email marketing.

Harvard Business Review made a comparison between direct mail and email marketing in this great article. To summarize their case study: direct mail is about 100 times more expensive than email marketing and in terms of return on investment, email marketing campaigns were about 95x more successful.

The email marketing barrier I hear the most is “I don’t have a list” or “My list is too small and I don’t know how to build one.” You can build a list and you can do it cheaply.

Capture email leads on your website or sign up customers at checkout by clearly explaining the value of signing up for your newsletters (so make sure there is East assess). Acquiring point-of-sale email addresses in person is inexpensive and simply involves training your staff to capture this information. Whether you’re offering subscriber product discounts, valuable information, or other exclusive offers, be clear and specific.

Don’t trick customers into giving you their email address or buying shady listings. Your goal is to get and keep more real customers, not win the world’s largest mailing list award or blacklist your IP address.

Technical advice : According to HubSpot80.8% of users say they read email on mobile devices. Therefore, once you have followers, be sure to use or create a mobile-optimized template for your e-blasts.

Tip #5: Get creative with your visual design (and create content for less)

Finding ways to incorporate promotional content creation into your day-to-day tasks (meaning what you do anyway) saves you time and money. Involve everyone in your business in generating visual promotional content.

Shout out to the beautiful people at Deeda Salon in Sacramento, CA

Take a hair salon for example: ask your stylists to take photos of their work and post them on Instagram. Use relevant hashtags so people can find your content even if they don’t follow you. I recommend using a tool like Sprout Social or Hootsuite so that a manager can approve content. In this scenario, you’ll probably end up with more content than you need, and you’ll have spent absolutely nothing to create it.

And why stop at stills when you can do it with video too? While I love being on location with a camera crew and agency actors, not all (or really) of your video content needs to be a full-fledged red carpet production.

Do you have a phone with a camera? Of course you do. Use it to capture (volunteer) customer testimonials, take a photo of the work you do, give your customers a quick look at the inner workings of your business, or stand in front and talk about your expertise for a few minutes. . Download photo and video editing apps on said phone (I like iMovie for iPhone and Snapseed photo editor for android Where iPhone) and promote!

If the smartphone isn’t quite up to what you’re trying to accomplish, consider getting a DSLR camera – they’re affordable and produce fantastic quality images and video.

Bonus tip: pay to play in search too

I have seen some of our retailers who were just using SEO strategies go from page 2 to page 1 and position 1 after allocating resources to paid search. Whether you’re new to display and search ads or looking to optimize your strategy, you should check out PPC University for tips on getting started and getting the most out of your AdWords budget.