Saving Money on Your Small Business Marketing

Getting the Most Bang for Your Marketing Buck

When starting a small business, knowing where to invest time and resources can be a delicate balance. One of the areas that many small business owners neglect is marketing under the notion that they do not have enough funds or hours in the day to make a big impact on their customers. Marketing is essential to launching a business and maintaining a strong customer base. When money is tight, there are some ways to help stretch your marketing dollar without sacrificing quality.

Do Not Recreate the Marketing Wheel

When developing a new marketing campaign many business owners start from scratch creating content such as posters or advertisements. More times than not, small businesses are generating marketing pieces that already exist or is very similar to what they have already done in terms of overall style and message. Instead of wasting time and resources starting over, it is much more cost effective to look at older campaigns and see if elements that have already been established can be repurposed.

During the brainstorming phase, pull out old marketing pieces such as flyers, emails or postcards – review these pieces and see if they can be tweaked to fit the current campaign. Unless there has been a major overhaul in the branding or messaging of the business, these older materials can be used as templates for more current marketing pieces. Reusing old files, even as just a skeleton for new content, will help eliminate unnecessary work and give a basis in which to work from with the new content.  

Be Efficient with Content Creation

In the small business world, there is usually one employee who handles creating materials for a marketing campaign. This person creates one version of a marketing piece at a time and then customizes this single piece into multiple other versions, one for each local market or customer base. Although this may seem efficient, creating and finalizing pieces in this manner can be time consuming for the employee and a long run process for the business, not to mention financially straining.

A simple way to streamline this process is by bringing in a professional graphic artist to help with customization. Once the main marketing piece has been created, a graphic artist will be able to create the individual versions that are needed for each market segment quickly. Although this may seem like it would cost more money, graphic artists can be much more efficient with small changes and allow the in-house employee to move on to the next marketing piece and using their time more wisely.

Utilize Distributed Marketing Solutions

Content creation is usually what small business owners pinpoint as the most expensive aspect of marketing – in reality, planning, implementing, and distributing campaign materials can be where most marketing dollars are invested. For business owners on a budget, this can be a daunting and even panic inducing thought. To manage this process correctly and within budget, consider using a marketing solutions program to help save money and keep timelines on track.

Small business owners face many challenges and knowing where and how to invest money can be one of the biggest issues. It is vital to remember the importance of marketing in order to build a solid customer base – even when funds are scarce, there are ways to still implement a successful marketing campaign without breaking the bank. By streamlining content creation and utilizing the services of professionals, small business owners can get the most bang for their marketing buck!

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