Digital marketing can be a costly venture for a lot of small business owners and full of really important questions to be asking to get the most out of that spend.
How much money should I be spending on paid advertising?
What providers are going to get me the most bang for my buck?
How do I know how much budget to allocate to each channel and what can I really afford?
There are so many questions you could ask about how to cut out digital marketing waste! I’ve narrowed it down to 3 main objectives you should be looking into to find inefficiencies and feel good about where and what you’re spending those dollars on. Every dollar counts when you’re a small operation!
1. Clean Your Data!
Having correct and clear customer data is vital to your digital marketing efforts, wether you’ve just launched you business or you’ve been established for awhile. Make sure you have a concise way to collect and update your customer information so that you’re able to connect and target them with the most updated information. Nothing says inefficient like sending targeted ads for a new sectional couch to a user who has already purchased one!
I also highly encourage using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to organize and help automate your sales and data collection. If you’re just getting started with digital marketing for your small business, there are affordable and even free- yes, free- CRM software available to you. Check out Hubspot’s starter CRM here.
2. Understand Your Digital Channel Budget Allocation
Chances are you probably know how much you’re spending as a whole on each of your digital marketing channels. The website gets this much, social media PPC ads get that much, so on and so forth. But if you are paying others for help, are you aware of what your provider management fees are for each of those channels? What about any additional fees they may include, like creative or production costs? Maybe you’ve opted into a feature you don’t use or forgot to cancel?
Breaking down the fine print of those contracts is just as important as understanding the budget as a whole. Most of the time there are some inefficiencies and excess you’re able to cut out to improve your return on investment. Trusting digital providers to put your businesses best interest at heart is optimistic and you should be following up on these questions to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
3. Overlapping Products
If you’re using a digital provider for some aspect of your marketing, sometimes they offer a wide range of services outside of what you originally hired them for. It’s good to have on file what exactly you’re paying for before looking into other tools or services to push your business forward.
For example, if your social media marketing provider offers you a creative package for your brand and charges a fee for hosting your Hootsuite account, see if you could get that waived and ask the provider to post using tools like Meta Business Manager’s Planner tool (which is free). If your budget is tight there’s no reason to be paying for a tool very similar to one that is available to you for no cost.
These touch points are a great way to get an overarching view of where your budget is going. Finding ways to improve your digital marketing strategy is an ongoing process, but a worthwhile one to allow more profit to flow into your pocket.
References:
Barraclough, D. (2022, January 12). How Much Does Digital Marketing Cost in 2022? Expert Market US. https://www.expertmarket.com/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-cost
Hubspot. (n.d.). HubSpot | Best Free CRM Software for Businesses. https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm