Budget cuts are never good. Every marketing decision needs a certain amount of money to be executed. Cutting your budget means compromising on the quality or scale of your execution.
Whether you are running an always-on campaign or shooting a brand film, or even running performance ads on social media, they require a significant budget. Reduction in spending affects the duration, reach, and quality of each task. This is bound to hurt your brand in some way or another.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, global economies have crashed. Businesses and agencies have fired numerous employees, while most others have taken pay cuts in some form or other. Budget cuts have been an inevitable part of this finance optimization method.
But is there a way to build your brand despite budget cuts, without hurting your brand image in the market? Here’s how the market leaders do it:
Start with small steps
There will always be some part of your business that has been running for a while but doesn’t have a significant ROI. The first step is to identify these projects or campaigns and start your budget cuts by reducing or cutting the spending there. These could be anything from bumper ads that get very few clicks to billboards or print ads that generate negligible leads and do nothing for your brand.
Marketing tools like Google Analytics can help you identify these channels and make a strategic decision.
Reassess your brand messaging
When the results are disappointing, brands worry they aren’t spending enough on reach and immediately increase their media spending. However, many times it is the inherent brand messaging that is flawed.
At this point, when businesses around the world are reassessing their marketing and media strategies, it might be a good idea to rethink and tweak your brand messaging. Make sure all your communication channels are putting out the same message in an aligned manner. If your messaging changes based on your marketing channel, it means something needs to change.
Reduce the number of broadcast channels
The average media strategy is a mix of social media plans, content calendars, blog content, bumper ads, emailers, films, and TVCs, and paid ads. Many times businesses that are eager to grow fast open every broadcast channel available to them, regardless of whether it helps them or not.
For example, a brand that has Gen Z as the primary target audience might benefit more from increased promotional activities on Instagram and Snapchat rather than Facebook.
Not all channels are equally profitable. Find which channels you can do without, or which cause minimal to no damage to your brand reach and image. Close them and save the money for other channels, or use it to cover losses in other areas of business.
Quality vs quantity
Big brands with gigantic budgets put out multiple social media posts per day, and have more room to test for performance. However, most small and medium enterprises don’t have this luxury. Don’t try to put out too much content, rather focus on putting out high-quality communication with greater potential to create an impact on your target audience.
Invest in marketing efforts that you are confident will be profitable for your business. In this situation, less is definitely more. To craft your communication in a better and effective manner, you can hire or consult Techmagnate, one of the leading digital marketing agency in Delhi which can guide and serve you in the best possible way.
Don’t pursue every lead
In a world without the Covid-19 pandemic, maybe this would not have made sense. But think about it. There are multiple leads that you know are disinterested and will end up wasting your time and resources, but you pursue them anyway. This is one place where you can stop spending time and money. Focus more on leads that fit your buyer persona better. This will prove more profitable in the near and distant future.
Cut down wasteful man hours
If your employees are spending valuable time doing menial time-taking tasks, they won’t have time to focus on improving the quality of the business or explore new opportunities. A great solution for this problem would be to automate certain processes of your business, wherever possible. A digital marketing services company can help you automate processes in the best way possible.
Chatbots in your website’s customer service section is a great example. Instead of having an entire ORM team spending time on tasks that can easily be taken care of by an automated responder, you will now have extra hands aboard to help you figure out the way forward for your business, and leave you more people to delegate and assign tasks to. That way, you’ll be free to take bigger decisions.
In the end
Remember that this situation is not permanent. You can always revert to channels you close and initiatives you discontinue, once the pandemic is over. Right now, what you need is to sustain your business and make every decision strategically.