Marketing is a vital consideration for any business, regardless of the size. Without a coherent and effective marketing strategy, there will be nothing to make your startup stand out from all your competitors. Just because you don’t have heaps of cash to spend on your marketing, that doesn’t mean that you can’t put on an effective campaign. Here are some simple tips for saving money and improving the effectiveness of your marketing.
Focus Your Branding
Brands are among the most valuable assets that any business has. Reinforcing your branding is an excellent marketing move in just about any circumstance. No matter how big your business is, you can accomplish a lot with a little if you approach your branding in the right way.
Make sure that you are always mindful of the core message of your brand. If you can stick to this message, whatever it might be, throughout all your branding and marketing, you will create a consistent message and will find it much easier to engage your audience. Whenever you set about either rebranding or looking for ways to reinforce your existing branding, always make sure that you consider what it is that makes your business unique and how that can most effectively be conveyed through your branding. If you keep these things in mind throughout, you will have to spend far less time and money when the time comes to do your rebranding.
Set Realistic and Focused Goals
Having specific goals to work towards is a powerful motivational tool. When we know what we are trying to achieve, it becomes much easier to formulate coherent plans for how we achieve it. If the goals that you set yourself, and your team, are unfocused or unrealistic, trying to achieve them will become nothing more than an exercise in frustration.
As well as establishing what you can and should be trying to achieve, you also need to think about the metrics that will inform you how close you are to achieving those goals. Many businesses end up holding themselves back. While they have set themselves a set of realistic and achievable targets, they have given no thought to exactly how they should measure their success in achieving those things.
If your goal is to improve the efficiency of your marketing, you need to do more than make this a vague aspiration. You need to look at past marketing campaigns, work out where you went wrong and where you could have improved them, and then implement those lessons in a meaningful way. Once you have identified the key indicators of a successful campaign, and how you can measure and achieve them, you will find the whole process much easier.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned cart emails are a potentially very powerful tool for increasing your conversion rates and saving your business a considerable amount of time and money on marketing. The concept of an abandoned cart email is very simple. When a user of your website thinks about buying something, going as far as to add it to their shopping cart, but then leaves your website without actually making the purchase, they have left an abandoned cart. By sending them an email reminder about it, you are greatly increasing the chances of them coming back to complete the order.
Abandoned cart email can be used as a means of improving your conversion rates by convincing users to make purchases where they otherwise would have simply forgotten about you. Every abandoned cart on your website represents potential lost revenue, something that no startup can afford to accumulate. If you can compose your abandoned cart emails the right way, you can turn these opportunities into sales with relative ease.
Set up an automated system for identifying these abandoned carts and send out an appropriate email. This helps you to convert these opportunities into sales without having to think about it. This will leave you free to focus your attention on other marketing tasks, all the while bringing in more money than you would have otherwise. Remember, every abandoned cart that is reclaimed is money that you otherwise may well have lost for good.
Stick to Your Budget
One of the most common reasons that marketing costs begin to spiral out of control, especially for a startup business, is that they have allowed themselves to exceed their budget. If you set yourself a realistic budget, you should have no trouble sticking to it. If you find that you do need to make any adjustments to your budget as you go, make sure that you only do so when it is absolutely necessary.
Keeping your marketing costs down isn’t always easy, but if you can manage it, the potential rewards are enormous. As well as focusing on the content of your marketing campaigns, you should always be considering how your campaigns fit into your overall budget and vision.
