Managing Marketing Plans With A Smaller Budget

How To Increase Your ROI With Less

Now everyone knows we are going through a major economic problem right now. Marketing companies and marketing divisions have more pressure on them now to create with limited and mostly shrinking budgets this year. It is more important than ever to manage which tasks are making us the most return on our money in our market. Our budgets are crucial and our ability to show  forecasts on which marketing efforts are producing will be a must in this climate.

Your business plan and strategic marketing plan will probably no longer be to speculate as much on things that look profitable and may be to focus more on the things which are already profitable. You will also want to be doing the things which can make you a lot more money for the same basic amount your budget allows right now. These decisions may not be yours to make. In this case you will be doing more with fewer resources and much more pressure; therefor it is time to maximize your efforts and allow easier decisions for clients and managers based on ROI and efficiency.

Web marketing channels such as: email, media buys, social media, pay per click and others are only as good as the systems which are measuring their effectiveness. When the chips are down you must make decisions based on what has worked in the past, how much it costs to run, and if you can accurately measure campaign effectiveness. This makes online methods very attractive because they can be more easily measured for multiple variables much more rapidly. That doesn’t mean online ads are better. They are more rapidly measurable and low-cost to test using methods such as pay per click advertising. They also enable you to test and track results in real time making adjustments as you go.

If you are marketing using any of these channels online, you are definitely using some kind of tracking tool like Google analytics or a tool you have become comfortable with to view visitor stats to your web property. You may also be using supporting marketing feeders to your main web site such as: blogs, Hub pages, Squidoo lenses, link building, and social marketing accounts of various types. You may be using pay per click in tandem with SEO to gain new insights on your market and both strategies to build on each other.

You can have very integrated advertising strategies or not, but at this moment it’s so crucial to know how well each channel is producing. You need to be agile and reallocate marketing dollars accurately and quickly. You may not get another chance if you take too long. This type of pressure will tempt you to go with your best guess strategy, instead of fact based decisions.

Different types of advertising platforms can take longer to assess like email might take longer than pay per click or SEO will take longer than banner ads. You cannot adjust for things if the ROI has not been measured yet. This information is not easily knowable by normal means although most businesses believe that it is easily chartable. It is of course knowable if something did well or not, but the trick is knowing “why” and not mistakenly thinking you know all the reasons when in fact you don’t.

Marketers and business owners think that because they know how something ended they know why it ended the way it did. This is absolute vanity and shows a person’s inability to expand their grasp on knowing their market. Many times marketers need to ask their Search Engine Expert to go into their site log files and report full metrics, statistics and analytics. You will want to know things like: The number of site visitors to specific pages from various sources, how many emails were sent on a specific piece and how many subscribers opened and clicked through.

If you can get quick access to that type of data you still must understand how to make sense of it and analyzing data from multiple channels is mostly very tricky and takes forever. If you are like most marketers I have known you will take the easy way out and find one or two data points to take action on. An example would be if you make decisions on promoting your ad on one keyword versus another based on faulty statistical data. This happens every day with web site owners and they often suffer for their poor decision which is not much better than tossing a coin.

What an online business needs is a platform which can measure all marketing channel effectiveness from one central system. Being able to view all of your business metrics in one location over time and even in the short run can allow the business owner to make rapid maneuvers when necessary. In 2009 it is fully necessary to do so and if you are not using conversion improvement methods properly your business is not firing on all cylinders.

There is no greater method to improve your company ROI than by simply converting a higher percent of your existing ad budget (think existing prospects) into sales. An integrated system saves you a mountain of time and also gives you a much higher confidence level, because you can make decisions based on proper measurement and analysis. It will be much easier to defend your reasons for spending advertising on specific channels to the business parties involved in the advertising spending decisions.

As I have said before most companies view the marketing division as the first thing that is burdening their company with bloated spending. You can turn this view point on its head for them by applying proper statistical data which is centrally measurable and accurate. Their will be no arguing with facts and then your conversion proof really will be the decider above anyone’s opinion about where money will be spent. This is good for you as the owner or the consultant, because either way you win more and you won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

Managing Marketing Plans Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog