Importance of Minimizing Total Marketing Costs

One of the most important aspects of running a prosperous business is marketing your products and services. In the excitement of doing this, many business owners tend to allocate more of their operating budget towards marketing. As they begin to see their advertising expense climb, a sense of fear begins to plague them.

Somewhere in the lifecycle of your marketing campaign, if you want to exempt yourself from falling victim to wasteful advertising spending, here are few strategies you can deploy:

Tips to Reduce Marketing Wastage Costs

• Target your Specific Audiences: Even if you spend more to reach more people, eventually only a small percentage of them will convert. Instead, when you narrow down on the audience you’re targeting and cater to those who are interested in your niche, you will end up spending less and converting more. Focus on quality instead of quantity.
• Reach your audience at the right location and right time: It’s all about reaching your audience at the right location at the right time. If you’re successful in doing this, you’ll end up reducing marketing wastage costs

Coffee cup advertising is a classic example of this. If the target group for your product or service includes people working in plush offices or IT parks, the medium subtly takes your brand to them in the right location and engages with them at the right time (tea breaks) when they’re more receptive to react to a marketing message.  

• Advertise on the Right Channels: Despite a whole lot of advertising options available online and offline, it’s important to figure out what the right channel for you is and where you audience spends most of their time. If a marketing strategy works for your competitor, it’s not necessary that the same will work for you too.

Doughnut-giant, Krispy Kreme entirely resorted to word-of-mouth marketing and had sales topping $1.07 billion in a year. In lieu of expensive TV spots and print ads, they leveraged on their five million Facebook followers.

• Engage your niche audience: A pre-requisite of every marketing campaign is creating high-quality content your niche audience will want to engage with. Rather than focussing on your products or services, think about your customers and show them how you can meet their needs and improve their lives. Popular hot sauce brand, Sriracha, got this right by engaging with Asian chefs before it caught on the rest of the world. Once they fell in love with its unwavering quality, they were happy to introduce the sauce with audiences that would catch the same pepper sauce fire.
  

It’s important to remember that your business’ needs will fluctuate over time. Your current marketing budget is never permanent. Even if you get rid of a strategy now, you can always analyse the pros and cons of it and reintroduce it as per your budget down the line. Whichever route you take, it’s important to invest wisely in your business marketing.