It is no surprise that businesses of all sizes are getting more careful about where they spend their advertising dollars. The pandemic has taken its fair share of casualties but also opened untapped opportunities for businesses who are wise with their marketing budgets.

In a fluid economy fraught with uncertainty marketing budgets are going through a rollercoaster – from total cuts, reductions, to increases. There is no predictable pattern in marketing spend as the world fights to recover from a pandemic.

So, should businesses be pausing marketing spend? It depends. There’s no right or wrong answer. One-size fits all solutions do not exist because so many new variables were introduced into the market in the pandemic. Businesses that are quick to react (too many overthink) stand a better chance of minimizing any negative impact.

Zig When Everyone is Zagging 

Businesses that muster up the courage to take calculated risks and execute can put themselves in a favourable position post recovery – driving desired positive business outcomes.

Executive teams must put their minds together, work closely together, and do the right thing, especially when things seem difficult. This means making bold moves to refocus marketing budgets and take calculated bets when everyone else seems to be pulling back. 

Stop, look, go

It would be a financial suicide if continue to be aggressive with advertising even though the market signals is not favourable. Allow wisdom to guide you. Just because you read blogs that say things like “when everyone is pulling back on advertising, double down,”  your employees will appreciate if your took a moment to stop, look, before you go.

Doing the difficult things today so you can win tomorrow

Here are a few difficult things that are worth your while and can help stretch your marketing budget by improving overall efficiency.

Stretching your company’s budget does not always mean optimizing your campaign, reducing advertising budgets, or pausing entire campaigns. A healthy dose of creative thinking will have your company looking at stretching your advertising budgets with new perspectives.

These are not easy things to figure out, but it is certain that most companies do not spend enough time on these activities because of impatience, poor planning, and lack of experience.

• Instead of increasing shipping costs, optimize your margins to keep your shipping competitive.
• Collect email subscribers and bolster your first-party data to supercharge your email campaigns.
• Making better creatives instead of mass-producing subpar creatives as a checklist task.

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5 ways companies can stretch their marketing budgets without reducing marketing budgets

When it comes to stretching marketing budgets, businesses can succeed by taking a 360-view on how and where money is invested to ensure each functional unit is performing optimally within its scope of duties. I would like to reinforce that stretching marketing budgets does not only mean throttling ad spend on paid media, as many would like to assume.

1. Using the right bidding strategy.

Review your bidding strategy to prevent your campaigns from getting pummelled. A strategy that worked 6 months ago may not work with your new business objective. Do not take this for granted. It may sound basic, it is – but I’ve seen too many businesses that get complacent and even the most basic things can wreak havoc.

Audit your campaigns to make sure they are aligned with any shift in business objectives. For example, if you are pivoting from volume to profitability, then your bidding strategy should follow suit.

2. Improve your conversion rate.

This takes time but the power in cumulative growth is nothing to sneeze at. For ecommerce companies, a 1% swing in conversion rate could mean tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in online sales.

3. Tightening keyword targeting.

With a tighter budget, business may want to pause keywords that are not part of the conversion path. Sounds obvious, right? But we’ve audited many accounts advertising spend is wasted on keywords that do not move the needle. With multi-attribution, advertisers can get better insights on what keywords are part of a purchasers’ journey.

4. Affiliate marketing.

If you’re not engaged with affiliate marketing, it’s a good idea to explore it. Why? Affiliate marketing is a commission-based channel. Other people will promote and send traffic to your website using SEO or PPC, which means you are not spending any of your dollars on advertising. For each sale though, you will pay a commission of around 8% to 15% to the affiliate – a bounty for sending you the best traffic that converted into a sale.

5. Lean into CRM strategies.

We’ve all heard about CRM or (Customer Relationship Management) technology before, but many businesses are still in their infancy stages in setting up a successful CRM process. Many businesses talk about CRM and throw it around as a buzzword and boardroom-speak, but, it’s easier said than done well.

Businesses can stretch their advertising budget by building a CRM system to manage its relationship with current and new customers. After spending thousands of dollars in acquiring customers and contact information, it is imperative that businesses lean into a scalable CRM solution that ties operational, analytical, and collaborative strategies to form a cohesive approach to winning hearts and minds.

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Wrapping it up

These strategies above are only a handful of ways businesses can stretch their advertising budgets. You’ll certainly come up with more solutions as your team works on improving key metrics for your business.

Above all else, ideas on how your business can stretch your advertising budget can come from any member of your team from interns to the most senior person. There’s no such thing as a bad idea when you’re navigating through times of fear, doubt, and uncertainty.