How To Spend Less On Digital Marketing And Get More ROI For Your Budget

Marketing costs money. To make some, you have to spend some. Creating a digital marketing budget can go awry fairly quickly if you aren’t really paying attention to the numbers of what makes sense and what doesn’t.

There are no definitive rules in how to spend money on digital marketing or where to spend it. Whatever works for your brand is the only rule. Your budget for digital marketing should be customized to your needs. How much you allocate should ultimately rely on what you expect to receive as a return and what would be most appropriate within the structure you’ve set out.

There is a reason that digital marketing campaigns often increase in budget over time. That’s because they work. When marketing works, a brand actually makes money through the new business these campaigns generate. That’s the ultimate reward – a marketing campaign that essentially pays for itself over time, taking into account all the positive attention it generates.

Here is how to spend less on digital marketing, optimize your digital marketing budget, and potentially generate more ROI.

Can I Do Digital Marketing With No Budget?

No, digital marketing campaigns do not work with no budget. You need some sort of financial backing. Even if your budget is small, so long as there is one, a campaign can be made from it. Smaller budgets may necessitate more time and effort in certain cases. That said, if your campaign generates enough of a return, you can continually reinvest and even grow your marketing budget the more successful you become. This is how so many businesses have ultimately started. They go from a very small budget used very intelligently and eventually jump towards something exponentially larger and more developed, all in line with the success of previous campaigns.

How Many Types of Digital Marketing Are There?

There are lots and lots of different ways to spend money on digital marketing and each will generate a different type of return.

SEO, or search engine optimization, targets Google and search engine platforms. SEO acquires website traffic and attracts qualified leads, with momentum building over the long-term.

Social media platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, connect brands to massive quantities of targeted users, creating conversation and generating brand awareness.

Content marketing and web design are so, so important to establishing an online presence. A skilled digital marketer will understand the value of keeping a brand’s website updated and active, and the return here is conversions.

Email marketing builds a subscriber list for you and fosters a direct connection with an existing audience, continuing to cultivate this connection to hopefully spur future growth and purchases.

Video marketing uses videos to reach out to clients on YouTube, social media, and to embed within your website infectious, ROI-driven content. Video is often used to build brand authority, get attention, and increase brand awareness.

Pay-per-click ads are the best way to create targeted online ad campaigns where you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ad, minimizing the risk of spending on something that doesn’t generate any clicks.

Where Is Your Target Audience Online?

A key question to ask yourself is where your target audience is. What social media they frequent. What their behaviour is online. An efficient use of your digital marketing budget is to dedicate funds to the platforms where your audience actually is. Don’t assume, either. Dig into the data. Create buyer personas for the ideal customer. Age, gender, job title, income, family life, motivations, and hobbies should all be identified.

How Do I Know I Am Spending My Digital Marketing Money Right?

To confirm you are spending your digital marketing money in the right areas, test your selected channels beforehand. Test performance channel-to-channel according to your KPIs. If you see stronger conversion rates on ‘A’ than ‘B’, you know to go with ‘A’. Do consider cost-to-conversion as well. Where you have the highest ROI is where to focus your attention, while also being aware of the value of cross-channel marketing and calculating the advantages of certain channels’ exposure.

Are You Remarketing To Leads To Get Them To Convert Or Buy Again?

You may think digital marketing is all about getting new users. While it can be, digital marketing universally applies to your digital presence which also involves existing users. Remarketing is a strategy that targets leads who have clicked and not converted as well as existing customers. Remarketing or retargeting is highly lucrative in the right context but can come across as spamming in the wrong context. In designing a digital marketing campaign that’s cost-efficient, remarketing may be the missing piece of the puzzle that helps bring up your ROI to where you desire it to be.

Can Monitoring And Oversight Save You Money On Digital Marketing?

To truly optimize your budget, digital marketing analytics and oversight count for a lot. As a campaign, everyone’s believing it will succeed. As you look at your analytics though, some aspects of it may not be working as hoped. In that event, you can pivot to something else, reallocating those funds into a marketing channel that is working. A digital marketer will know when to do this and how long to give a strategy before one declares it as having underperformed.

Do New Trends In Digital Marketing Matter When Building A Campaign?

New trends in digital marketing can be helpful to know. Some will apply to you and some won’t. Trends that are still fresh come with risk. They are often still developing and prone to things like algorithm changes. Investing a lot here without justification is dangerous. That said, you may discover there to be a large upside and if you have the space in your marketing budget for it, absolutely trends can be something to piggy-back off of.

Does It Matter What My Competition Is Doing in Digital Marketing?

Although it won’t impact your budget, looking at what your competition is doing in digital marketing might provide some ideas on what’s working and what isn’t. You don’t want to duplicate or automatically do the opposite of them, however, look for your own marketing opportunities here. See what you can do differently. They may or may not be optimizing their budget. The competition, especially locally, is worth having a look at for inspiration.

When Do I Know To Stop Spending Money On A Marketing Campaign That Isn’t Working?

A marketing campaign that isn’t working doesn’t deserve more money. If you think there’s a possible way to salvage what you have and increase those numbers, try it. However, know when to cut your losses. For various reasons, a campaign might fail. Be sure to collaborate with your other partners in sales and marketing, using raw data and ROI to determine how much more budget to open for a campaign that may not be providing the numbers you wanted.

What Are the Costs of Digital Marketing Agency v. Doing Your Own?

Beyond what operating on different marketing platforms will cost, there are other things to factor in such as buying software and online marketing tools, analytics programs, and/or training employees on how to use them. Whether you are well-versed in digital marketing or not, there subsequently will also be a cost to the time and effort you have to put in to learning these new software tools, monitoring, and managing everything. There may be more of an advantage to hiring a digital marketing agency.

A digital marketing agency takes care of everything for you. All the technical stuff. Your job becomes purely to help guide and strategize. It’s a lot easier to do, a lot more fun, and ensures you’re not overwhelmed with everything that has to be done to launch a digital marketing campaign on your behalf.

For more information on how to build a digital marketing budget, speak with a representative at Unlimited Exposure today.