How to Optimize Your Marketing Spend

For marketers operating on a tight budget, optimizing your spend is one of the best ways to improve performance while making the most of your marketing dollars.

How can marketers optimize their budget to get great results? This blog highlights the core concepts of marketing spend optimization and eight proven strategies to optimize your spend.

Marketing spending optimization is the process of evaluating how an organization can best use its marketing dollars to target customers, maximize campaign effectiveness, and optimize costs. The process combines marketing research with data analysis, aiming to choose the most effective and efficient channels to receive the highest ROI possible.

For smarter marketing, here are eight ways marketers can optimize their budgets.

1. Market research

Market research is a step every marketing leader should take to make well-informed decisions and help optimize their budget for future campaigns and activities. The more information you have about your target audience and market, the better you can allocate your marketing budget. There are many different ways of conducting market research: surveys, questionnaires, roundtables, interviews, and customer profiling are just a few of them.

2. Test your marketing campaigns

You may find some of your marketing efforts ineffective for highly commoditized goods. In this case, it’s a good idea to pre-test your campaign. See what works and doesn’t for your product. The results will help you tweak your offers and other elements of your business’ marketing plan.

3. Analyze existing data

Another essential step toward optimizing your budget that is often neglected is to analyze existing data. Studying your existing marketing data can pull a lot of important information. This data can help you understand where your customers spend their time and money, how they interact with your brand, and what purchases they make. Be sure to discuss your findings with the rest of your team as well. Full visibility into this data and a clear understanding of what it means will only push your team to make smarter decisions on their own.

5. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has become an essential part of any long-term strategy. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all platforms that provide you with endless opportunities to reach out to potential customers and build a loyal customer base. Digital personalization touches every single phase of your customers’ lives. Whether you decide to take the organic growth route or choose a paid strategy, be sure to have the right resources in place to manage each channel: Outsourced vendors, Social Media Managers, and Paid Search Specialist all fit this role

5. Measure ROI

Every marketing campaign needs good marketing spend analysis and an objective benchmark to look at it. Since every marketer wants the best ROI (Return on Investment), measuring your campaign’s different aspects is crucial. If you measure marketing ROI, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy according to what works and what doesn’t.

6. Create a marketing plan

A highly effective marketing plan will help you structure your campaign and organize marketing efforts. When planning, you must consider all the different marketing channels, your marketing spend, and the methods available. At the end of every quarter, your team should assess your marketing results and reevaluate your marketing strategy for the next quarter. This keeps your team nimble and, with an agile marketing approach, ready for the unexpected.

7. Optimize for success

The purpose of marketing is to convert traffic into sales. To do so, you must know what works and doesn’t in your particular market. Identify the sources of traffic that are converting well and those that are not converting at all. Then adjust your marketing campaign to make it more effective. Be a data-driven marketer and enhance ad spend optimization for the ROI you deserve.

8. Use a Marketing Funnel Builder

By calculating funnel metrics, it’s easy to figure out the amount of budget needed to achieve your metrics. Planful’s free marketing funnel builder helps you optimize your marketing spend by calculating demand generation KPIs and the budget needed.

In Closing

These eight ways to optimize your marketing budgets are important considerations to generate a great marketing ROI. By following these tips, you can better avoid wasting your budget with rudderless marketing efforts, and you can be more efficient with your time.