Five ways your budget can go further

In the last week three clients asked us questions about budgets for the year ahead. It's great they can speak with us openly as they allocate funds to different marketing priorities.

It makes it easier for us to help them deliver on their targets for the year ahead. Yet we still see most clients set budgets internally and without any consultation.

And in many cases during the course of the year they realise they can't quite achieve the goals they'd set as some budget has already been wasted in less-profitable areas.

To help you avoid these issues here are five ways your marketing budget can go further:

1. Invest in assets. Create marketing assets you can promote repeatedly. Videos, free downloads, websites, interactive tools and brand guidelines are all examples of one-off investments that generate returns year after year.
2. Apply the 80/20 rule. If you're investing time and money to develop a marketing asset, allocate at least 4x that amount to promote it - really sweat the asset before you spend on creating another.
3. Conversion optimisation. If you've invested in a website, don't settle for the leads your version 1 generates. Hire someone to go deep on the data and make changes that get it delivering more every month.
4. Buy the cheapest traffic. Most businesses just repeat tactics that have always worked, even when new tactics are cheaper. For example, even if Google Ads have always worked, drop them and switch to Facebook Ads if those leads are cheaper.
5. Challenge your agency. Ask them a simple question: "if this were your budget how would you allocate it to get the maximum possible return?"

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