If your business is struggling to make a profit, or if it’s reached a critical stage of growth that makes it difficult to stay in the green, you might be interested in finding a way to cut marketing expenses. At the same time, you probably don’t want to sacrifice your marketing results.
So are there any strategies that can help you preserve your marketing benefits while simultaneously allowing you to reduce expenses?
Consider Using a Fractional CMO
Fractional CMOs are experienced marketing leaders with similar if not identical credentials to traditional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). They typically have the knowledge and experience necessary to help you analyze your existing marketing efforts, brainstorm new strategies, and execute those strategies in a way that can make you more profitable. Additionally, these flexible contractors exist outside your organization, so they can help you identify potential blind spots and biases that may be holding you back.
A fractional CMO is an investment, even if you don’t use them for very long. However, they often pay for themselves quite quickly. If you don’t already have a marketing director or leader in place, fractional CMO can give you the direction you need. And if you already have a CMO or similar marketing leader, a peripheral fractional CMO can give you the boost of brain power you need to take your organization’s marketing to the next level.
Conduct an Analysis
Regardless of whether you choose to use a fractional CMO, it’s important to conduct some kind of analysis. What types of results are you currently seeing? Which strategies of yours are most effective? Where are your biggest areas of weakness and why do they seem to be weaknesses? Even without making any changes, this information should start pushing you in the direction of meaningful progress.
Identify Your Biggest Expenses
You also need to identify some of your biggest expenses. What are some of the strategies, channels, platforms, and other expenses that are costing you more than they’re worth? In some cases, you’ll be able to cut these expenses entirely. In others, you may be able to scale back your spending so you can reallocate those dollars to an area that’s more profitable for you.
Cut Unnecessary Waste
Marketing waste comes in many forms. It’s imperative that you track it down and eliminate it if you want to maximize profitability.
These are just some of the most common areas of marketing waste:
- Unnecessary tools. Marketers love investing in new tools to help them create more dynamic materials, advertising new channels, or simply improve data tracking. While many of these tools are so helpful they’re practically indispensable, others don’t provide nearly as much value as they cost.
- Weakly performing channels. Take a close look at channels that are performing weakly. Which of your marketing and advertising strategies are critically underperforming compared to how much you’re spending on them?
- Excess labor. It can be challenging to evaluate the worth of your employees, especially if you have a tight-knit workplace. However, excess labor can cost your organization dearly and compromise your ability to turn a profit in the marketing department.
Reallocate Funds to More Successful Channels
One of the most effective things you can do is take marketing dollars from less successful channels and funnel those dollars to more successful channels. If you aren’t sure which of your channels are most effective, that’s a sign you need to do more active experimenting.
Do More With Less
You can also focus on doing more with fewer marketing dollars. These are just a few of the tactics that can help you here:
- Practice niche targeting. Niche targeting is the practice of targeting a very specific demographic or segment, so that you can increase the relevance of your messaging and narrow your audience focus. Generally, the more specific you are with your targeting, the better; people don’t really resonate with generic messaging, even though such general messaging might be able to reach a wider audience overall.
- Transform and reuse assets. Make use of assets you’ve already created for your brand. For example, is it possible to consolidate some of your best-performing blog posts into a comprehensive eBook on a given topic? Can you take that video interview and syndicate it across podcast channels, then transcribe it for your blog?
- Focus on free and inexpensive strategies. You can also focus on free and inexpensive strategies. For example, take advantage of organic posting on social media or collaborate with other content creators.
Ultimately, the solutions you need are going to depend on the exact nature of the problems you face. It can be difficult to identify and analyze those problems, even with the help of an experienced hand, but you go into your organization to make positive changes in the direction of greater profitability.
