Businesses live and die off their ability to grow a customer base and increase trust in their brand. Making the most of your marketing budget while improving your company’s public standing is no simple task, but these tips will help any organization make the most of its limited resources.
Read on to learn the top 3 methods for making every marketing dollar count.
1) Leverage the Power of Content Marketing
Content marketing has earned its shining reputation as a form of long-tail advertising that accomplishes a wide range of marketing and brand-building goals, such as generating leads, educating your audience, and increasing brand authority. Something as simple as a regularly updated blog page on your company website can help you build your brand while also establishing your organization as an expert in its field.
Content marketing in the form of expertly written articles or snappy infographics help to build public confidence in your brand. Balancing information and entertainment tends to work best in most sectors. Powerful content marketing approaches focus on the creation of evergreen content that can be repurposed across different campaigns and platforms into the future. This is why content marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods of advertising.
Creating your own posts and coming up with new ideas can be a time-consuming task, but the effort is well worth the reward. New content releases also help pad out your social media calendar by giving you a great excuse to talk up your industry and your business’ role within it. And this conveniently leads us into our next method for stretching your marketing budget:
2) Be Engaging on Social Media Platforms
Most businesses leverage social media in some way, but the vast majority of them treat their social media pages like a flier distribution channel by just spamming out ceaseless and shameless advertisements. This approach to social media management for brands misses the entire point of social media platforms. To make the most of social media channels, you can’t just post ads. You need to actually socialize.
Social media platforms make for excellent channels to engage with current and prospective customers at every stage of their journey. Each social media platform has its own quirks that can be leveraged to maximize your brand’s effectiveness at capturing the audiences on those platforms. But learning these quirks can take some time.
Instagram, for instance, is a great place to post eye-catching images, of course, but the platform is also perfect for punchy blog posts that accompany the images. You can even repurpose blog articles from your website to use as Instagram posts or vice versa—a fact which underpins the cost-effectiveness of creating evergreen content.
You might be thinking that our tips so far require a lot of time and energy. And that is true. Both content marketing and social media marketing require careful planning and thoughtful execution to be effective. But you don’t have to do it alone.
3) Choose the Right People for the Right Jobs
When it comes to the idea of stretching a budget as thin as reasonably possible, the thought of doing everything yourself inevitably comes to mind. Many people have a misconception that doing something on their own is “free.” But doing everything yourself isn’t free at all. It may not cost you any additional dollars, but time itself is an invaluable and incredibly finite resource.
While you’d love to do all the work yourself, there just isn’t enough time in the day for one person to manage all the fine details. And, unless you’re a marketing, writing, photographing, video-making, meme-generating guru of unparalleled skill, you will likely take much longer to produce content that would still be sub-par in quality compared to the output of trained professionals working in their niche.
Hiring your own crack marketing team might be a practical choice depending on the size of your organization and its marketing budget, but outsourcing is most often the more practical and cost-effective route.
At Cardinal, we believe every organization deserves to find its audience. Get in touch with us to learn about how we can help your company do just that.
