Your business expenses rise while your marketing budget shrinks.
Sound familiar?
Companies across the globe are now looking for ways to achieve more with their digital marketing budgets in this tough business climate. According to Gartner’s survey, digital marketing budgets were purported to rise by 10 percent in 2014, after a double-digit percentage increase last year. The survey further revealed that on average, companies spent 10.7 percent of their 2013 annual revenue on overall marketing activities, with digital marketing accounting for 3.1 percent of the revenue.
For doing well in the market, you need to secure big budgets to develop offerings, define products, and attract and retain new customers. But increasing a decreasing marketing budget is far from an easy feat. Funds need to stretch further and work harder.
The good news is it is possible for companies of all sizes to take measures that increases their capacity to set aside bigger budgets. Here are some ways to stretch the digital marketing budget your company allocates:
1. Reduce wastage of resources
You must identify wastage of resources that go into traditional advertising, such as cost of printing extra leaflets, business cards, etc. Funds should be redirected towards digital marketing. Costs may be eating away at your digital marketing budget in a number of ways, such as increasing traditional advertising costs through inefficient management and reworking.
It is essential to impose rules on your traditional marketing department. Insist on a specific amount of reworks on ad pieces and other printing materials to save sustainable costs. Try to establish a clearly defined workflow and approval process, so it reduces the need to rework and the saved amount can be allocated to the digital marketing department.
2. Try to save where possible
The best way to allocate a higher budget to digital marketing activities is to save business costs wherever possible. Savings can also come in the form of economic development and tax incentives; the financial gain can be invested to increase the digital marketing budget of your company.
According to ADP.com, there are several hiring and job location tax credits and similar incentives available to businesses today. These credits can help offset your business expenses as well as lower your effective tax rate. But, it can be difficult to capture all incentives available to a company. So businesses require specialists that help them identify all business incentives available and dedicate their practice towards maximizing incentive capture. All these savings can be geared towards the marketing budget.
3. Improve employee productivity
Inefficient processes can lead to wastage of budget as well as prevent the digital marketing department personnel from using their real skills. Automation can provide streamlining of approvals and it also provides the means to see errors generating inefficiencies. It can also improve employee productivity through quicker access to information and documents.
Bottlenecks in processes may delay activities. Lack of coordination between processes may lead to missed deadlines; so organizations need to make sure that the right personnel is having access to the right resources at the right time.
4. Become buddies
A unique way for businesses to increase their digital marketing budget is to become partners with other organizations or companies for co-marketing each other. Perhaps you can join non-profits who may be interested in investing in your digital activities.
In a competitive environment, the need to leverage the partnership with other companies, increase speed to market and reduce costs will create greater space for the marketing budget. By following these processes and business rules, you can achieve maximum business benefits while streamlining your digital endeavors.
