Getting the most out of your digital marketing budget for 2021
How do I get the most out of my attraction’s digital marketing budget?
This is one question that every digital marketer out there is still trying to figure out, and it’s even more relevant after such a challenging 2020. Marketing teams are trying to get the same results but with lower budgets and fewer resources. From identifying their target market to boosting their social media presence, attractions are looking to get more with less. They’re also asking how they should spend their digital marketing budget to get the most out of it.
Digital marketing has been a key focus for over 10 years, since the advent of smart phones, and COVID has greatly accelerated this trend. Companies have been scrambling to take advantage of the numerous benefits of digital marketing within their budget. In case you are a digital marketer and are looking to get the most from your current digital marketing budget, you are in the right place.
I will give you some insights on how marketing gurus are running their digital marketing campaigns. This could prevent you from flushing money away without a clear ROI.
With that being said, here are some of the tips that you should follow.
Quick takeaways;
- Lack of proper market research will always result in unnecessary money spending on wrong messaging and targeting.
- If you are not sure of your target market or their needs in a post-COVID world, conduct market research to find out and get yourself back on track.
Develop a marketing strategy.
As a Digital marketer, you cannot create or manage your budget without a plan or strategy. At Semantic, we always start with the end in mind, so the first thing is to set clear goals for your marketing campaign. This could either be to increase website traffic, attract new customers, or improve the number of sales.
Identify and target your audience effectively.
Each marketing strategy is more productive when the right audience is identified and explicitly targeted. One of the biggest mistakes made by many new digital marketers is optimising their marketing strategies to reach as many people as possible. This is a quick way to spend lots of money without driving your ROI. Reaching a large group of people might look good from a visitor perspective, but unless these are relevant to your attraction you’ll struggle to move the bottom line and drive bookings.
If they do not resonate with your message or the messages, they are irrelevant. It will not matter how many people you end up reaching out to. Even in a scenario where you are working with a broad base of potential customers, your message should always be specifically targeted.
Ditch what is not working for you anymore.
This is one of those strategies that can be difficult to follow. Let’s say you have your budget evenly distributed among five separate campaigns.In the process, you realise that one campaign is not delivering the expected results. Do not continue dumping more money into that campaign.
There are some exceptions to this when it comes to SEO. This is because SEO takes a few months before you start to feel its effect fully. If you begin seeing poor results for other types of campaigns, it would be a good idea to ditch them and then re-evaluate what went wrong. Then change it. Don’t be afraid to try new things, and always be looking through data to learn and improve campaign performance.
Repurpose your campaign material.
Your strategies will always require some type of core content or material when running your campaigns. Repurposing your content will always help you avoid overspending on creative work. For example, you will need a call to action and a central message when it comes to creating ads. In social media marketing, you will require on-site material to link to along with short headlines or updates. In such a scenario, you can always recycle your content across different mediums. The same is true for blog posts - a simple post can be written and then tweaked to repurpose across several platforms to help drive relevant traffic to your site.
Conduct market research.
The only way to encourage your potential customers to take the desired action is by sending the right message out there. Sending the wrong message will only make you waste your resources. The only way to accomplish that is by conducting market research that will help you understand customer behaviour. Research-driven decisions will always help you avoid overspending.
For example, let’s say my company plans to launch a new product on the market, and I would like to make sales once the product is launched. What most marketers would do is set a budget for product marketing and product promotion campaigns.
These two are essential aspects, but it’s also even more important to set a budget for market research. You will require feedback from your customers about the area the product addresses or should address to structure a message that will resonate with your customers. Your website should be a great tool to carry out some of this research - data should be being tracked that you can analyse and gather insights from. In addition, there are tools that can be used to run surveys, user testing and other studies, often for much less money than comparable market research would have been to do in person.
Experiment on different strategies.
Having a positive Return on Investment (ROI) on a given strategy is always a good thing. Still, chances are there are other strategies out there that can give you much higher ROI. For this reason, you should always be willing to experiment with different strategies. Try out a different audience, additional content, and other tactics. Afterwards compare the results you get to identify a strategy that is your best fit. This is always important when there are major changes on a given platform.
Again, your website data and systems should be set up to help you with this, and to give you a head start with any gaps and things that resonate with your audience.
Set your priorities right.
The main aim of a digital marketing campaign is to maximise your profits and minimise the costs. As we all know it’s always easier said than done. However, you should always monitor the success of your efforts in order to be able to determine the effectiveness of your strategies. This is so you can determine what’s totally necessary and what you should get rid of. Most website tracking tools won’t track everything you need out of the box, so it’s worth taking some time to map out user journeys and make sure every stage is being tracked properly.
After all, it doesn’t make any sense investing in marketing strategies that aren’t paying off. The key objective here is not to focus on the, “spend more on marketing,” approach but instead turn all our focus on, “spend smart on marketing,” approach. Something that’s going to be very important for attractions planning their online marketing campaigns for 2021.
Set and reset your goals.
Before you launch any digital marketing campaign, you should always outline your goals and what you aim to achieve. Increased awareness always results in increased revenue. You are more likely to have multiple goals if that is the case. Always keep track of what they are, so that you can constantly measure your success. Once you achieve your goals, set new goals so that you can always be making continuous progress.
In this article we’ve given you a few tried and tested ideas to help you get more from your digital marketing budget.
Do not be afraid to test new things.
Make sure you’re tracking what’s working and what isn’t.
If something isn’t working, do not continue to throw money at it, do something else.
That last point is one of the most valuable pieces of advice I can give you.
If you need help setting up your tracking to make sure you understand your customers, then just drop us a line. We can provide free website audits or give you help to setup your analytics tracking, campaigns and SEO to level-up your online performance in 2021 and beyond.