In the Marketing Budgets 2016 Report, published by Econsultancy, 85 per cent of almost 500 businesses polled since 2011 revealed that their marketing budgets remained consistent or increased year on year. This trend is likely to remain continue over the next few years.
Last year, it was found that 30 per cent of a business’s marketing budget went online, and this is expected to grow to 35 per cent by 2019. On top this, an August 2016 report from eMarketer found that 75 per cent of respondents expected to increase their Google Adwords investment over the following year, which is more than any other digital channel.
With more money going on marketing and media advertising for a business, it can be difficult to decide how best to spend an advertising budget, and how to make the right assessments of its use to make it go further each month and year.
Keep track of your media spending and ROI with media audits
It’s important to keep track of how much you’ve spent on your media, and where, so you can see how effective your campaign has been on making money for your business. It’s also worth checking your adverts to make sure they’re appearing in the right places at a competitive price. Carrying out these checks, whether of your own advertising team or through a media agency, is called media auditing.
Media audits analyse the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by comparing the overall spend with the ROI. When used effectively, media audits can help you set attainable goals and performance targets for future campaigns, and ensure your business stays on track to grow and develop.
While most businesses may not be able to effectively track the media spend, there are agencies that can assist with media auditing. For example, global agency AuditStar “evaluates media cost and quality delivered against targets and the previous year results”. Consultants from the company then set attainable future performance targets for your business, and offers support to reach these goals.
Take a step back to see what media works best for your business
We live in an over-communicated world, and customers are now switching from platform to platform, which can make it more difficult to pinpoint where your target market is. Because of this, it’s even more important to keep checking where the most traffic to your business is coming from, and investing more time and money in these channels. You can fund this by taking the budget from media sources that aren’t doing as well, and adjusting your overall media budget.
You should be keeping an eye on all the media you invest in for your business, and track what your customers are responding well to. If one platform is doing better than others, it’s worth investing more time and money in that media, rather than wasting resources on less popular channels. Just because it’s easy to set up an account on every social media platform, doesn’t mean it will be worth doing.
Be picky when choosing what social media accounts you want to target—just because it’s easy to set up an account, doesn’t mean you should do it. It’s better to have a few well established profiles to effectively reach your target customers, than lots of subpar accounts to maximise your outreach.
Be prepared to spend money to make money
A massive 97 per cent of consumers search online for services, according to The Core Association. So in order to make sure your business is found, it’s important to invest your money in marketing and advertising your services to reach as many consumers as you can. While a lot of marketing can be done for free by simply posting to social media, sponsored posts reach more users and ensures that your post continues to appear on a news feed to customers, and other users who may be interested.
However, if you want to advertise in magazines, TV, radio, and other forms of media, you will need to pay the fees to have the advert in the right place. You can work with media agencies for this, to find the right price and package for your business needs. With the internet as crowded as it is, it’s important to spend your money in the right way, in order to maximise your profits and get the most return on investment.
Expand your media options as your business scales up
As your business scales up, you can begin to expand how you advertise to your target market in order to draw in more customers. For example, if you were heavily relying on free posts on social media, or the odd paid post, you can try expanding your media options to include magazine adverts, or more sponsored posts online.
Completing market research and keeping an eye on competition in the industry to see what they’re not doing can also help you find a niche market, which can help you grab new customers. It’s important to keep up to date with your competitors, so you can track how they are progressing and try and stay a step ahead in the industry. It’s also important to see how your competitors are advertising, to try and find a new angle with your own ad campaigns.
