Deciding where to allocate a tight marketing budget can be tricky. Especially in times like these where the economy is unstable. Think about what your business is lacking and look at competitors to see where you could gain an advantage. Most important is carefully planning how you are going to spend your marketing budget for the rest of the year. Here are our tips and ideas:
Consider your previous marketing budget allocations:
Think about what worked for your business last year and what has been working so far this year and do more of that. If your business is already performing well under certain marketing campaigns, keep putting money and effort into these areas. Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken.
Look at all your existing marketing tactics and identify which ones you are missing. For example, perhaps you are spending a lot on branding, social media and your website but are lacking attention to your SEO and email campaigns. Events, especially for physical businesses, can be of a huge benefit too.
Work out what you have left:
Look at the revenue you have made so far this year and base your calculations on this. If you are an established company with a longer history, then usually you don’t need to allocate quite as much money to marketing as a new start-up business. However, since Covid19, all businesses now need to up their marketing game and therefore, it might be time to reconsider your budget.
Plan carefully where you want to focus the remainder of your budget and how much you want to attribute to each area.
Focus on digital marketing:
Now, in 2020,
Google receives over 84,000 searches every second. Putting money into marketing your business online, therefore, will help leverage this online audience. Invest in marketing software like Hubspot to help you manage your online inbound marketing strategy or HootSuite to ease your social media management. Setting aside a decent amount towards video content creation is also an excellent idea. Not only is
YouTube now one of the most popular social media platforms with over a billion users, but video content on other social networks does extremely well also. For instance, a staggering
83% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. Paying for ads on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is another great way to attract online users.
Hyperlocal marketing:
Physical businesses have suffered a drastic decline in footfall because of the lockdown. This means they need to market specifically to attract nearby customers to their stores.
We have a whole blog post dedicated to just that! But, put simply, to do this,
businesses need to dedicate a portion of their marketing budgets to Hyperlocal and Local SEO. This includes things such as:
- Listing Management & Clean Up
- Listing Optimisation
- Citation Building
- Reputation Management
Building and managing online listings across multiple platforms such as Google, Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram and Yelp, will help your business show up in local search. Ideally, you want your business to appear in the Google search top 3 map-pack result. This way you will attract and acquire more nearby customers.
Optimising these listings is how you perform Local SEO. Add business information such as NAP (name, address, phone number), opening hours, categories, photos, etc to increase your chances of ranking higher in local search results.
See our blog on GMB features to learn more about this!
Ensure you don’t have inaccurate information or duplicate business listings as this will only confuse customers and inhibit your chances of them choosing your business.
Finally, monitoring your businesses online reputation requires
at least a small chunk of your marketing budget. You should keep a check on the reviews uploaded to your online business listings to understand your customers’ experience with your business. Furthermore, monitoring these reviews allows you to respond quickly and with a relevant response.
Try Vicinus
Our hyperlocal marketing software Vicinus can help you with all of this inside one easy-to-use centralised platform. This means you do not have to separate your marketing budget into individual chunks for separate services. You can cover them all in one place with one purchase! Vicinus even uses AI and ML technology to simplify the hyperlocal marketing process for you. For example, Vicinus can identify irrelevant images on GMB listings and gather customer sentiments from reviews so you can automate tailored review responses. Vicinus can also build an SEO-friendly store locator and location pages for multi-location businesses!
Visit our website to learn more about how our Vicinus platform can help you acquire more customers. Or email us at contact@vicinus.ai to speak to one of our experts and find out about pricing.
