When times get tough, belts get tight, and consumers stop spending, one of the first budget items that businesses cut back on is marketing. Paradoxically, marketing is the last thing you want to cut in an economic downturn. The best money spent is an investment in your business’s future, and marketing isn’t a cost but an investment. If done well, the money you spend now will come back to you, and then some. You’ll stay top-of-mind and maintain relationships with customers while they’re not spending so that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll know you’re there for them. Sometimes, however, the budget for running big advertising campaigns just isn’t there, but you still need to get your products in front of the right people. Whether you’ve allocated a sizable budget to marketing or you’re trying to get your voice heard without overspending, you want to make sure your marketing strategy is cost-effective.

Marketing Strategy

If you want to stretch your marketing budget as far as it can go, the first thing to do is approach marketing strategically rather than tactically. Tactics are things like, “let’s send out an email about this” or “let’s buy an ad on Google.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing either of these provided they are undertaken as part of a marketing campaign developed to achieve the goals of a marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy details marketing’s role in executing your business strategy. First, you identify your unique selling point and your ideal customer, and then you outline the most effective way to reach that kind of customer. A marketing strategy will also position your brand, analyze competitors, define goals, and identify the metrics by which progress toward those goals should be measured.

Approaching marketing strategically is in itself a cost-effective decision. Aligning marketing strategy with your overall business strategy will keep you from wasting money on unfocused, short-term, reactive, purely tactical marketing. Before even creating the first ad or promotional email, you will know who you’re marketing to, how, and why, as well as what constitutes success.

Marketing Campaigns

Within a marketing strategy, marketing efforts should be organized into campaigns. A marketing campaign is a coordinated series of shorter-term actions taken to advance your long-term strategic goals. Let’s say, for example, your marketing strategy is about increasing customer loyalty, measured by retention rate and customer lifetime value. To achieve these goals, you might design marketing campaigns around building a sense of exclusivity and community around your products.

To this end, you might feature user-generated content, such as images of your customers using your products, on your website or social media. You might tell stories that highlight a particular emotion or experience you want to associate with your brand. You might add customers to a mailing list that offers post-purchase support and exclusive promotions. Whichever approach you choose, your campaign will be bound by a budget, a schedule, a timeframe, clear goals, and metrics for success.

Email Marketing

When you think “cost-effective marketing,” your first thought might be social media. While social media is certainly inexpensive, it’s actually email that offers the highest ROI of all digital marketing.

Email marketing isn’t the one marketing tactic to rule them all. But for nurturing leads and encouraging loyalty among your current customers, it is hard to beat. Once you have the email address of a customer, there’s no better way to bring them back to your website than with a promotional email. Whether you’re nurturing a lead through the customer journey, increasing brand awareness, building customer loyalty, or encouraging a sense of community among your customers, email marketing campaigns are your best bet for cost-effective marketing.

A Smart CRM Is Your Marketing Command Center

A successful marketing campaign relies on gathering the right data and interpreting it correctly. This includes website analytics—information on things like who is visiting your website, how they got there, and how long they are staying—as well as email analytics (open and click-through rates) and social media analytics and social listening (who is talking about you online and what they are saying). To get the most out of this data, use a smart CRM to gather it all in one place. Centralizing your data results in more useful comparisons and insights and a more aligned marketing strategy.

A smart CRM is not only useful for gathering the data that will inform your marketing campaigns. It’s also where you’ll manage those campaigns. Depending on your CRM of choice, you’ll be able to add contacts, track interactions, segment mailing lists, and create automations and email templates, ultimately saving you time and money. We’re experts in a number of CRM systems, from feature-rich HubSpot to flexible Odoo to easy-to-use Thryv. Let our technology experts assess your needs and get you started with the CRM that is right for your marketing strategy, goals, and budget today and in the future.