3 Ways Marketers Can Do More With a Smaller Budget

Good marketing is predicated on adaptability and innovation, and the global pandemic challenged marketers in ways they hadn’t been before. The COVID-19 pandemic had a massive influence on all marketing practices, but arguably the biggest early challenge marketers had to adjust to was budget cuts.

According to a new surveyOpens a new window , marketing budgets (which were already slashed in 2020 due to the pandemic) are continuing to decrease in 2021. The amount of organizational revenue allotted to marketing was drastically cut, from an average of 11% in 2020 to just 6% in 2021. This begs the question for marketers: How can we do more with less?

There’s no denying the power and potential of a full-fledged marketing budget, but there are changes marketers can make to ensure the lead pipeline doesn’t run dry, and they’re still scaling and growing their businesses.

Instead of panicking, marketers can learn to pivot their strategies and embrace their smaller marketing budgets in ways that still bring them great success. Read on to learn more.

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1. Activate Leads From Marketing Automation

One of the most powerful ways to save money while still marketing effectively is through marketing automation. Using this technology, brands can ensure quality leads are appropriately nurtured and can also greatly reduce staff hours wasted on time-consuming tasks, giving marketers more bang for their buck. As teams get creative and find new avenues to reach leads in their marketing funnel, they can lean on marketing automation to re-engage lost leads, nurture existing leads, and enhance real-time messaging to create more meaningful moments for leads in your pipeline.

A powerful way marketing automation can supercharge efficiencies is by helping brands to refine their message to best resonate with their audience. By refining your messaging in the lead generation and nurturing stages, brands can significantly increase audience engagement and catch the attention of leads. This can be accomplished in several ways:

1. A/B test emails to see which email copy, landing pages and ads are effective so you can adjust accordingly.
2. To optimize each stage of your funnel, learn what converts contacts to MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) by measuring initial lead scores from different messages.
3. Estimate the average sales cycle to better forecast and optimize by measuring the amount of time it takes leads to convert to MQL, SQL, and won opportunity stages.

Another way marketing automation can help brands do more with less is by re-engaging lost opportunities (leads that never converted to sales). Most organizations don’t do enough to re-engage lost opportunities. Instead, they turn their energy and focus on active and hotter prospects. And while that makes sense, no company has ever won 100% of their deals, so you need to account for those lost opportunities with tailored nurture programs.

However, nurture programs should be carefully executed so that you don’t become just more “noise” in a former prospect’s inbox. You’ll want to carefully curate content that highlights why your product or service might be worth taking another look so that you are adding value to the conversation. Additionally, you can conduct quarterly or annual check-ins to see how things are going with whatever selection the former prospect made and highlight new updates to your product and services so they can continue to see the value.

Finally, marketing automation can help you nurture existing customers. In many cases, marketers stop after the lead is “won.” But, by continuing the customer journey after the lead becomes a customer, you can build trust and loyalty. By building that trust and loyalty, you create long-lasting customers and ones that are more likely to invest in more of your products. You can nurture existing customers with marketing automation by:

1. Conducting regular check-ins to ensure the customer is satisfied and their needs are being met
2. Leveraging behavioral insights and responding to their engagements with recommended products or services that reflect their own interests and needs
3. Using data to determine what the customer could be using and is not, and offering free trials, coupons, and deals to get customers to explore more of your products.

Marketing automation’s robust technology allows marketers to accelerate strategy and be more efficient. It seamlessly helps marketers better tailor, target, and improve their messages to see what resonates best with their audience and revive opportunities previously thought to have been lost. This is all to say, with marketing automation, you can do more with less, making it a good investment for marketers strapped for cash in their budget.

2. Be Strategic With Your Events

21% of businesses’ marketing spend went toward events in 2019Opens a new window but it’s safe to say that has not been the case in the last few years. Event budgets were among the first to be cut because they weren’t necessary anymore. A lack of events and in-person meetings induced a Zoom-apocalypse and cloud-based-comms arm race as companies rushed to imitate aspects of previous event models.

For most brands, a deft shift to virtual webinars and conferences effectively simulated the event experience but at a fraction of the cost. Virtual events, many of which pivoted to a free model, are affordable to host and attract more attendees as cost and transportation issues are often eliminated. We saw many brands adopt this model in the pandemic; however, due to the influx of virtual events, the competition for attendees can be fierce. It’s important to find a way to stand out from the crowd by presenting a unique experience to encourage audience engagement and keep their attention.

On the other hand, in-person events can be a massive driver of business, and the lack thereof left some businesses reeling. But that’s not to say you should jump straight back into hosting events to only bring in new leads. You have to be strategic and select the events that will be the most fruitful for your business. Customer events can be extremely profitable, so they should be prioritized as you introduce in-person events back into your marketing plan. Remember, engaging existing customers can often be more important than attracting new ones.

An alternative to events, whether in person or virtual, is to strategically adapt that budget to digital marketing in the short term until your organization is ready to dive back into events. Digital marketing can be accomplished and accommodated to any budget, depending on a brand’s needs. Brands who switch to a digital marketing model (like marketing automation, Google Ads, social media advertising, SMS, or email marketing) are able to drive revenue in a similar way to events, but at a fraction of the cost.

3. Ensure Sales and Marketing Are Aligned

In addition to strategizing around events, it’s also critical to have marketing and sales departments aligned. While marketing budgets may be down for the count, it’s important to focus on the resources you already have, like marketing automation. Marketing automation provides increased visibility into the marketing funnel and helps get sales and marketing teams on the same page so that no lead falls through the cracks. When you can nail the handoff between marketing and sales, you close more deals and save more time and resources — a top priority for marketers struggling with budget cuts.

However, the relationship between marketing and sales is more than just making sure they get along. It’s also about operational alignment where they know when to engage with a prospect, the prospect’s past behavior, and more.

Behavioral insights about leads and lead scoring can help marketing and sales teams determine when, how and where to interact. For example, if someone researching property insurance clicked on your website and downloaded a one-sheet, they would need a totally different approach from an individual who had already been shopping for property insurance and filled out the form to get a quote. They are at different stages of the shopping process and require different forms of communication, and would therefore receive different lead scores. Having insight into this data and knowing when leads are warm can help sales and marketing teams work together to create a seamless customer experience.

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Takeaway

It’s a tough world for marketers right now, as budgets continue to remain low while demand for leads and business growth is ever-present. Fortunately, by reworking event budgets into digital marketing tactics, aligning sales and marketing teams, activating leads from marketing automation, and nurturing existing customers, marketers can still see great success in their campaigns.

What strategies have you put in place to achieve more with smaller marketing budgets? Let us know on  FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .