As you find yourself tightening up on your company’s budget, you may find that you don’t have as much money to spend on marketing and advertising as you would have liked to have. Even if you’re not tightening up but still find yourself with a relatively small budget to market your company, what is the best approach that you can take?
Some people will tell you that you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. They will tell you that you should try out several different strategies to determine which one works the best for your particular demographic and niche. For example, you may spend some of your budget on online advertising, another portion in the local newspaper, and another portion with a few radio spots. This may sound like a good idea, because you are attempting to reach the largest audience possible. However, because of your limited budget, each of these strategies may yield minimal results.
When working with a smaller budget, it may be a better idea to focus on one area at a time, targeting one specific demographic or type of advertising at a time. In this way, your resources (which include your employees and your ability to track the results of the campaign) are better allocated and can be focused on one area. Instead of splitting your attention across several venues, you can zero in one just one. With more money focused on this one area, you may actually yield more impressive results.
For example, you may choose to spend the majority of your budget on a series of ads in the local newspaper. You can have your ad spot run for several days in a row, constantly reminding the readers of the paper of your company and what it has to offer. If you only had the ad run for one day in the paper, the reader may notice and forget. They may hear of your company again on the radio the next day, but they may not connect the two. By seeing the same (or similar) ad in the same paper for several days in succession, this potential customer may be made more aware of your brand and this may have a longer-lasting value.
What’s your take? When you don’t have too much money to spend, is it better to spread it out or to focus on one strategy at a time?
Ron
March 19, 2009 2:12 pm
Nice article. In tight economic times, it’s truly Guerrilla Marketing that will get you through. Spread out the effort to different strategies, but be flexible and end the effort as soon as it begins to fail. Learn from any failure.
Make the most of free marketing methods such as Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and other social media tools.
Just don’t make the mistake of ending your marketing and ad campaigns during a tough economy.
Chris Mathieson
March 19, 2009 7:24 pm
I think our little museum is a perfect little case study for this.
In the end, the key is to take the time to really understand your position in your market. We’ve decided to invest in some strategic partnerships that open us up to others’ audiences; let someone else do the work of drawing those people together and we can reap the rewards.
And I disagree with Ron that you should drop efforts as soon as they “fail”. It’s so hard to accurately measure long term performance. We’ve been laying groundwork at the Police Museum for years with little obvious reward; by many metrics, we should have dropped them long ago… but in the last four days we’ve seen it pay off handsomely, as that groundwork has created a network of support that has propelled us to do as much business in 4 days as we do in a typical (slower) month. Not a single ad buy, not a single press release, just a great deal of thought into a product and some well-established groundwork for message distribution.
I love chatting about this stuff, feel free to ping me on Twitter. (@policemuseum)
Dave Macdonald
March 19, 2009 7:35 pm
This is an interesting question. I think that it’s organization-specific though – does management know well enough what works for the company?
I don’t think there’s one answer – I’m not even sure that free methods necessarily factor in depending on what one’s industry is.
Being able to assess what will work for a company, versus what will work overall, is the real skill and probably where the real value lies.