Small Business Tips Uncategorized
How to Stop Overspending On Marketing – Avoid These 6 Mistakes
Branding and marketing are two essential areas for every business. However, they are also two areas that can potentially cost a fortune. In the US, the average annual marketing spend is currently between 7 and 10% of a company’s revenue. But many companies make the mistake of spending a lot more, often with little to no result. If you don’t know where to avoid overspending, you can easily end up blowing your budget on marketing tactics that have very little ROI.
Don’t get caught in this trap. Knowledge is power.
Find out more about the six ways businesses tend to overspend when building their brand and marketing themselves. Now, you can stay within your budget while supercharging your marketing campaigns.
Here are 6 Keys Ways That Businesses Overspend On Marketing:
1: Diluting Marketing Efforts Across Too Many Channels
There are few aspects of digital marketing that are more important than having a focused approach to your media mix. There’s a seemingly endless number of marketing channels to target with your campaigns. Many marketers make the mistake of spreading their efforts too thin to reach as many people as possible with their messages.
Diluting your marketing messages across too many channels can rapidly eat away at your budget, and may even diminish your brand’s reach.
It’s generally better to focus on marketing on a few key platforms, especially if your business is small or newly launched. Start on two or three channels that align with your target audience’s preferences, demographics and interests, and work from there.
You can always expand your marketing portfolio as your budget increases or as new data about your target customers comes to light.
2: Neglecting Analytics And Stats
A recent survey showed that 32% of marketers consider analytics, data, and competitive insights as the most important element in their marketing strategies. Essentially, marketing without the use of solid data is really just guesswork. If you’re aiming to stop overspending on marketing, especially online, you need to know which campaigns are ending in engagement and conversions, and which aren’t.
The sooner you obtain this information, the better for your business.
Analytics, statistics, and data enable you to make better, more informed decisions about your marketing approaches. And virtually every other aspect of your operations, too. Almost everything is measurable in the eCommerce industry, from consumer preferences and behaviors to clicks and engagement rates.
Assessing conversion ratios allows you to find ways to capture your audience’s attention more effectively, and at a lower cost. It also enables you to find the keywords that are actively converting leads into customers, and to drop the ones that aren’t as effective.
3: Investing In Strategies Without Researching Them First
Inexperienced business owners and marketing professionals often make the mistake of prioritizing their own instincts over hard data. They may have preconceived notions about their target audience, how their target customers think and feel, and which forms of marketing will work best for engagement.
These instincts may be rooted in reality. But without objective data and statistics to verify them, you simply won’t know whether or not a certain marketing strategy will work in your favor.
Let’s take an example to illustrate this point. A marketer spends $3,000 on Instagram marketing based on their instincts. After a few weeks of running an advertising campaign, they discover that their efforts only resulted in $600 of new sales. The marketing channel, branding, graphics, style and font, message, or any other of the many factors present were not appropriate for the target audience. Or the incorrect audience was targeted to begin with.
Research solves these issues before they cost your business money. It empowers you to invest your resources in the most effective strategies without having to learn the hard way first. Studies back this theory up, with recent research revealing that 2 out of 3 marketers found data driven decisions far more effective than those based on intuition or gut instinct.
4: Forgetting To Monitor Ad Spend
Marketers that manage pay-per-click campaigns with fixed budgets often find it challenging to track and monitor their advertising spend. However, if spend is not actively tracked and managed, it can quickly lead to costly and unnecessary over-expenditure.
There are many automated tools like Shape that enable you to monitor your ad spend across multiple platforms. This ensures that your advertising campaigns are worth what you’re paying to have them broadcast. The best tools automatically pull in metrics and spend from the campaigns you add to your budget, providing an intuitive view of how your ad campaigns are spending against their target budgets.
Some tools even provide the option to segment your data by client, budgets, and campaigns to ensure that you’re working within the budget provided while still marketing effectively on the channels that matter most.
5: Failing To Use Automation Tools
Automation tools are essential for every business, whether they’re used for marketing, invoicing and accounting, time tracking or any other integral results-driven purpose.
Marketers can use automation tools to get the word out about their brand without overspending. These tools streamline the marketing process significantly, while saving marketers time, money and effort in the process. They can extract and simplify valuable insights into consumer behavior, which allows you to tailor your marketing campaigns to the true needs and pain points of your key audiences.
Marketing software like HubSpot, Omnisend, Marketo, and Eloqua are cost-effective. Plus, they allow you to add numerous marketing tasks to your automated workflow, including email, text message, push notifications, and social media messaging services. A whopping 78% of marketers already maintain that they would struggle to cope without list segmentation, and this number is set to grow even higher.
6: Expecting Immediate Results
Even the best, most strategic marketing efforts don’t produce instant results.
It’s essential not to become discouraged when you don’t see the expected results from your marketing campaigns. It can be challenging to place a time frame on results, as locating, targeting and building the right audiences takes time.
There are, however, a few things you can do to improve your chances of seeing rapid results. Having a well-established and clear brand identity, brand message, and target audience all help to make your marketing campaigns more effective, more quickly.
If you want to avoid overspending on marketing, it’s important to bear in mind that it can take months, and in some cases, even years, to reap the rewards. Give your new marketing strategy time to work rather than switching your approach too early on.
The Not-So-Secret Formula To Success
There are many businesses that make the mistake of overspending on their marketing efforts in a bid to engage as many potential customers as possible. A targeted approach has been proven to be more effective. Especially if you use hard data and analytics to inform your marketing strategies and target the right platforms and people.
Remember to be patient with your marketing campaigns, they could take time to produce the results you’re looking for!
