Don't Stop Marketing even when making Business Cuts and Cost Savings

The landscape for just about everyone is pretty dismal right now, especially in business.

The UK government has really destroyed the economy; cost of living is at the highest level it has ever been at, and you might have seen demand in your business drop off of the face of the earth.

While you’re being sensible and trying to make the right decisions, something I keep seeing and experiencing is business decision makers completely cutting all marketing spend and effort. Don’t do it!

Marketing is what will keep your business relevant and available to people who are ready to spend. There are still people out there with money and the need for what you do.

Here’s why you cannot stop your marketing, and how you should cut back on your marketing if you really need to.

Why you can’t stop marketing right now, or ever really

Marketing is what gets your business noticed. So if you stop it, how can you expect to grow your business? Especially in these tough times, you can’t stunt your growth, you need to push through the struggle to make it out the other side.

Marketing is what will supply your sales team with leads. And with consumers doing more research than ever online before they buy, this is exactly why you’ve got to be doing digital marketing.

62% of buyers would rather consult a search engine to learn about a product than speak to a salesperson, according to Hubspot.

I totally get it, you need to free up cash. And where’s the fastest place you can do that? Marketing. Stop all spends, stop all efforts and recoup that money you had set aside.

True for the short term, but actually, you’ll lose more in the long term – no leads, drop in sales (or no sales), lack of money coming in. It’s suicidal to completely cut your marketing spend.

When you’re not marketing, how can you really expect new customers to find you?

You can’t, unless of course you’ve done a cracking job with your search engine optimisation (SEO) and your website is sooo easy to find.

Whether you’re doing SEO, paid ads, social media marketing, or something else, it’s so important that you keep up the good work. Or, if the results are not good, reassess your position and figure out the way forward to get results from your marketing.

Your marketing options and their cost/return on investment potential

Website content and SEO

Website content writing and SEO is an absolute no brainer for your business. 

These two go hand in hand, and they’re very cost effective. Successful businesses rely on website content to get them sales and leads.

The success of content relies on what we call ‘organic growth’, meaning there’s no paid budget behind ‘boosting’ that content as you would with Google paid ads or social media paid ads.

Once you’ve written a piece of website content with SEO in mind, that content can sit there online without any additional cost. You are effectively writing content that can live on.

The cost

Website content can cost anywhere from £100 for a piece of content. Whether it’s a website page, landing page, product description or blog.

The return on investment can be huge, to the point that you make back your money from the investment and then some.

If you were to sit there and track how many enquiries you got from that piece of content, how many converted into a sale and calculated the cost of the content with this, you will eventually get a a minus cost! The content lives on, which means it keeps getting customers to buy from you. That’s the beauty of content!

This does rely on the fact that the content is written to a high standard, ranks well and converts customers.

Remember, people do their research more than ever: 62% of buyers would rather consult a search engine to learn about a product than speak to a salesperson. Content is how you speak to them. They prefer to be in control of their decision, and your content can help them get onto that buying mindset.

Google ads and other ad marketing

As mentioned above, ads can be expensive. They do however put your business right in front of people’s eyes who have searched something relevant to what it is you offer.

But if you’re looking to spend wisely, then Google or social media ads might not so sensible.

They are, however, a good option if you can get a low cost per click and make back your investment with a decent conversion rate once a customer clicks through from the ad, onto your website, and buy.

Be careful with paid advertisement, that’s all I’m saying here.

The cost

Paid advertisement costs vary, depending on the competitiveness of your industry and search terms. You will need a budget for the cost to bid on your search terms. And if you use a business like us to manage those ads, then you’ll need a management budget of at least £500 per month.

As we said, it can be quite expensive. Results can be great though on a well set up and thought about ad.

ROI completely depends on your daily/monthly spend on ads and how much you sell your products or services for. You want to get a good balance between monthly spend and how many sales you get from the ads.

Email marketing

If you have a good database of emails that are profitable, then email marketing could be great.

Or, if you can build a database and then chat to them and nurture them into buying, brilliant.

Email marketing is really effective for many businesses. Getting it right however is a challenge. You really need a good system in place to easily manage your emails, and most importantly, you need to get the content right.

You think writing to appeal to people looking around online is hard, you need to try and write an email subject line to get people’s attention – which means writing 9 words to get their attention. It’s hard, and I’ve been a professional copywriter for nearly a decade.

The set-up and management of email marketing isn’t our speciality, however, email marketing copywriting is. So we cannot offer too much insight here, only that it’s a great tool to have. And with content that really talks to your audience, you can be really successful.

So, the cost of email marketing copywriting only, would be around £200 per email. If you wanted someone to manage your email marketing campaigns, you will pay them a management fee of anywhere up to £1,000. Or you can try to manage it yourself on Mail Chimp or Hubspot.

Print marketing – leaflets, brochures etc.

Printing leaflets is pretty cost effective. However, you do really need to spend some time on the design and content of your printed stuff. And then you need to work out how you’re going to get those leaflets out there – you’ll need to help of a distribution company to manage this for you.

Print marketing is still really important, even in this digitally savvy world we live in. Get your leaflet, brochure or poster in front of the right person at the right time, boom, you may get an enquiry.

Again, we do not manage these kind of projects, we ourselves focus on the quality of the content on your printed material.

The cost of content for leaflets for example would be around £200.

Content for a brochure would be around £300. 

However, ROI can be hard to track on this. Unless you had a promo code for customer to reference, tracked url, or a unique tracked telephone number to track, then these are the only ways to determine that a customer came from the printed thing you created. Which isn’t possible, it is easy enough to set up.

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