A strong economy leads some company owners to cut back on marketing spend. Why spend the money if business is so good? Others see it differently — a robust economy means more sales opportunities. Therefore, pouring dollars into marketing is the way to go.

The right approach for your company depends on many factors, but one thing is for sure. That is, few businesses can afford to cut back drastically on their marketing spend or stop altogether, no matter how well the economy is doing. Yet spending recklessly may be dangerous as well. Here are three ways to creatively get more from your marketing dollars so you can cut back or ramp up as prudent.

1. Do More Digitally in the Marketing Spend

There are good reasons to remind yourself of digital marketing’s potential value: the affordable cost, the ability to communicate with customers directly, faster results and better tracking capabilities. Consider or re-evaluate strategies such as:

• Regularly updating your search engine optimization approaches. This approach will help your website rank higher in online searches and more prospective customers can find you.
• Refining your use of email, text message and investing in low cost social media marketing to communicate with customers. For instance, using more dynamic messages to introduce new products or announce special offers.
• Offering “flash sales” and Internet-only deals to test and tweak offers before making them via more expansive (and expensive) media.

2. Search for Media Deals

During boom times, you may feel at the mercy of high advertising rates. The good news is that there are many more traditional marketing techniques than there used to be and, therefore, much more competition among them. Finding a better deal is often a matter of knowing where to look.

Track your marketing spend and efforts carefully while also dedicating time to exploring new options. For example, podcasts remain enormously popular. Could a new implementation plan within you marketing budget exploit their reach pay dividends? Another possibility is shifting to smaller, less expensive ads posted in a wider variety of outlets over one massive targeted marketing campaign.

3. Don’t Forget Public Relations (PR)

These days, business owners tend to fear the news. When a company makes headlines, it’s all too often because of an accident, scandal or oversight. But you can turn this scenario on its head by using PR to your advantage.

Specifically, ask your marketing department to craft clear, concise but exciting press releases regarding your newest products or services. Then distribute these press releases via both traditional and online channels to complement your marketing efforts. In this manner, you can make the news, get information out to more people and even improve your search engine rankings — all typically at only the cost of your marketing team’s time.

A Winning Investment

These are just a few ideas to help ensure the dollars your are spending on your marketing plan play a winning role in your company’s investment in itself. We can provide further assistance in accounting your marketing expenses and spend, as well as in developing a feasible budget for next year.