Marketing On a Budget: Tips and Tricks

A penny saved is a penny earned, and there’s no better way to improve your agency’s bottom line than to be strategic with your spending!

As a scaling agency, staying agile with your spending can make all the difference. Just the same as in our personal lives, unexpected costs pop up all the time in business, and you can never be too prepared for when they do. Whether it’s a rainy day, or a sudden boost in client requests that leaves you longing for that one extra full-time employee, being smart with your spending will give you options; and in the world of competitive business, having options is everything.

We’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way, and figured what better place to share them with you than here?! So, without further ado, here’s a list of our go-to methods for saving that extra nickel and dime for when you need it most:

Take Time to Know Your Customer

This might sound simple, but knowing who your customer truly is will make a huge difference in your ability to market to them effectively. Rather than taking a shotgun approach to ad-spend or throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, really hone in on who your target customer is and what they want. Understanding their needs as best as you can will help you fulfill them in the most cost-effective way possible.

Find your Niche and Own It

It’s a competitive world out there, and in the same way that knowing your customer can help you save money, finding a niche and really owning it can help do the same. Try being the master in one niche, and then tailor your long-tail keywords and SEO to help you track down only the highest-converting customers. As an example, a Vegan consumer searching for a Chinese Take-out in LA will likely search for “Best Vegan Chinese restaurants in LA” and go with that top hit, rather than searching for “Chinese restaurants LA” and filtering through menus one by one looking for the best vegan dish. The same applies for your agency! Are you the best agency in the Renewable Energy space, great at Pay-Per-Click? Let the people know that and the right customers will come flooding through the door.

Focus on Customer Loyalty

The very best way to save money is to increase your Lifetime Customer Value. In other words, get your current customers to spend MORE. Every business, big and small, has a customer acquisition cost – (the cost you pay to earn someone’s business), and the only way to make your business profitable is to ensure that the money you bring in from each customer is greater than the money it cost you to acquire them. Signing long terms contracts can be one effective strategy, but so can upselling other services. Consider what your customers need most, and be sure to let them know that you can help them with it!

Measure, Measure, Measure

This is by far the most important thing to do when it comes to optimizing spend, and strategizing for the future. Understanding the impact of a marketing campaign is important, but so is measuring the usefulness of the tools that you have deployed in your business. Is your Marketing Automation Platform helping you get the return that you need? Is your CRM too expensive for the value that it offers? If you can, try and put a dollar value to what you get out of the tools that you use, because all those monthly recurring costs do add up.  

Keep an Eye on Trends

Oh boy, if only I’d realized 5 years ago how popular influencer marketing would be now! Keeping an eye on trends will absolutely pay off – not just in the dollars that you spend today, but where you channel your efforts for the future. Monitor specific platforms, (and their ever-changing regulations), as well as any new tools that emerge. Knowing what you have at your disposal and leveraging the best of what’s out there can really help give you a leg-up and ensure that you’re getting the best possible return on every dollar that you spend.

Of course, we’ve got a pretty great tool that can help you market effectively and scale your agency in a way that optimizes spend. If you’d like to know more, be sure to hop on a call with one of our Cloud Campaigners… we love difficult questions and are always thrilled to help!