1. Reduce marketing costs
While every business is different, there are two major categories of marketing costs:
- Direct costs – these are the expenses you incur directly related to your marketing efforts. These include things like paying for ads and services, travel expenses for meetings, or even the cost of sending out a mailer.
- Indirect costs – indirect expenses are those that don’t happen immediately but will eventually find their way into your ledger. For example, if you hire an outside firm to design your logo—that’s an indirect cost because it happened well before you saw any results from it.
There are several ways to reduce both categories of expenditures—you can even start by getting more out of what you already have:
2. Maximize the impact of your marketing team
To make the most of your marketing team, you should encourage them to work in a way that makes them more efficient, effective, productive, creative and agile. For example:
- Marketing teams that are more efficient can help reduce costs by doing more with less. This includes automating repetitive tasks (like sending out newsletters) to free up time for more valuable activities.
- Marketing teams that are more effective use data-driven insights to inform decisions and improve the ROI of their campaigns.
- A marketing team that’s highly productive has clear goals for each project and is able to meet those goals on time or ahead of schedule.
- Creative marketers come up with innovative ideas for new products or services as well as campaigns that engage prospects on an emotional level—all while staying within budget constraints imposed by finance departments!
3. Streamline the marketing team’s workflow
Be mindful of the time your team spends on repetitive tasks. You might think that these tasks are necessary, but they could actually be holding back your marketing team’s productivity and costing you money.
To streamline workflow, consider the following:
- What are the most common recurring tasks? Are there ways to automate them? For example, can draft materials be created in bulk before being sent back for review or revisions?
- Do certain projects require more resources than others? If so, can those resources be shared across different projects or departments when possible (i.e., using a graphic designer whose talents aren’t needed elsewhere)? Or would it make more sense to hire another employee whose skills align with those needs (such as an analyst who knows how to create an effective PPC campaign)?
These are just some examples of how you can streamline workflow within your marketing team by identifying unnecessary processes and eliminating waste—which ultimately means lower costs for you!
4. Improve the creativity within your marketing team
To improve the creativity within your marketing team, you should:
- Encourage your team to think outside of the box by providing them with time and space to explore new ideas.
- Ask every member of your team to propose at least three ideas per week that could improve your business.
- Use tools like Google Docs or mind-mapping software (e.g., MindMeister) to capture new ideas, support brainstorming sessions and make it easier for people to share their thoughts across different departments or countries without having to meet in person all the time.
5. Manage the technology portfolio of your marketing team
The use of marketing technologies has exploded over the last few years. As a result, it is important to manage the technology portfolio of your marketing team. It is also necessary to get rid of redundant technology, optimize the marketing technology stack and improve its performance.
Ensure visibility and control over how you market your business
It is essential to have visibility and control over how you market your business. You need to keep track of marketing spend, results, performance, efficiency and effectiveness in order to understand the true value of each marketing program. In addition, tracking costs is important for understanding how much money has been spent on advertising campaigns and what it cost per lead or sale generated.
The key metric you should be measuring is the return on investment (ROI). This means measuring how much money your company makes compared with the amount that was spent on marketing activities such as advertising campaigns or content creation projects.
