One thing every business owner wants to do is make their marketing dollars stretch a little farther. Here are a few no-nonsense tips to help your marketing budget be effective and generate great results for the least amount of money.
Ways to Stretch your Marketing Budget
- Listen to your customers and ask questions. Would they recommend you to a friend? Do you know how your customers want to consume information? Ask the questions to get the answers and then most importantly, respond with action!
- Repurpose your marketing tools. You may have a great video on YouTube, but have you also uploaded it to your Facebook page, embedded it on your blog, and sent it out via your e-newsletter? Maybe the same video content could be transcribed and printed into a small mini-guide to hand out at a tradeshow or event.
- Avoid mistakes with commercial printing. Always proof, then proof again to avoid costly mistakes. It also helps to learn some common print terms to know what questions to ask when seeking options to save money. Maybe your next catalog would be more cost-effectively printed with a different type of stock or a slightly different finish size. For smaller quantities, a digital printing will get you the best price. On an offset printer, ordering a larger quantity could save you thousands of dollars! When working with a printing and marketing company like J-C Press, we can be your guide so that the best decisions are made for your goals and budget.
- Maximize marketing opportunities that are practically free. Thoughtfully planned organic social media posts, writing articles or being interviewed for a magazine, sending out press releases, encouraging user generated content, and more can be practically free marketing for your company.
- Find good marketing partners. Be careful not to try to do everything yourself, as tempting as it may be. Working with experts in different niche areas will help you save money (and ultimately make money) in the long-run. Having a trusted, printing company, marketing agency, and web developer as part of your sales and marketing team will help provide advice for making sound decisions. A partner with a rich history like J-C Press can help you with many aspects of marketing, from direct mail, to printing, promotional items and apparel, and more!
- Integrate your marketing. Marketing has a lot of moving parts… From a tradeshow presence, to a website, print collateral, and everything in between. But, is your messaging, branding, and overall “look and feel” integrated? When all aspects of marketing are integrated together (especially print marketing together with digital marketing), it becomes more effective and easier to manage.
- Measure up. To truly understand how your marketing is working and giving you the best results for the least cost, it must be measurable. Measurement with digital marketing is easy because of all the data. Traditional marketing such as with print could be measured with Google tracked URL’s, keycodes, customer surveys, and more.
J-C Press would love to be your trusted partner in marketing and print. Let’s talk about how you can stretch your dollars with your next marketing project, whether it is a direct mail campaign, brochure, or apparel. Give us a call at 507.446.5300 or request a quote here.
