Don’t let the money in your budget go to waste!

This year is winding down faster than any of us can keep up with. Before you know it, it will be time to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. It will be time to set up your marketing budget for the upcoming year. But, before you can do any of that, you need to spend what is left of this year’s budget.

Here are a few of the ways that we have recommended our clients successfully close out their year.

Content Strategy

marketing budget cost: approx $2,500 for long-term strategies, or $1000 for quarterly strategies.

A content strategy lays out the exact pathway to reaching your goal. The goals are almost always one of the following: “drive traffic,” “boost sales,” “improve credibility,” “align the team,” or “help to sell the company.” If you (or your marketing team) spent any time in the last year feeling overwhelmed, this is a perfect place to bring in some help. And, by bringing in help, you spend money this year for work that will boost your company’s performance next year.

Emails

marketing budget cost: starting at $100

If there’s one place that our clients need help keeping up, it’s reaching out to clients on a consistent basis. Hire a content team to lay out a calendar and set up your email newsletters, autoresponse emails, and follow up emails. It’s the simple things like this that go a long, long way.

Blogs

marketing budget cost: starting at $150
Earlier this year, our construction client got an introduction to a potential new client as a result of a blog post we wrote. This potential new client has facilities nationwide and was looking for bids immediately. I don’t want to jinx anything, but it certainly looks like the deal will close for more than $2 million in work, with the potential for future projects as well. Not bad for a blog post that cost them just over $150.

Case Studies

marketing budget cost: starting at $1,000
In my opinion, case studies are underutilized. Think about it, one person finds success by using simple design in their products and everybody jumps on the bandwagon. Why not harness that power by potential clients the kinds of success that you have provided to your current clients?

Social Media Posts

marketing budget cost: approx $800 (varies wildly based on outlet and amount of posts)
During the month of November, we laid out a full year of posts for a restaurant client. The posts covered every holiday, including some quirky holidays that fit their niche, some giveaways and features on menu favorites that we know will stay relevant throughout the year. Evergreen content like this saves money in the long run and allows you to focus on client interaction. And nothing is set in stone. If something needs to change, it’s easy to make changes, especially if you use a social media tool, like CoSchedule.

Greeting Cards

marketing budget cost: approx: $650
For retail and restaurants, making a personal connection to your clients can be difficult, time-consuming, but extremely beneficial. To help our clients build loyalty, we collect birthdates whenever anybody signs up for emails. We then send birthday cards (digital or print) with a little coupon to help them remember who cares about them.

Localize your business

marketing budget cost: starting at $99
When a client needs to find you, they turn to Google. If your business is not localized, Google will only deliver your website address and nothing more. But customers are lazy (I mean no offense, after all, I am a customer too), and they won’t click through and search. They’ll  find someone else, or they’ll find something else to do. So, spend a little money up front to capture the fickle minds of today’s consumer.

Build a prospect list

marketing budget cost: starting at $120 (varies wildly depending on the info requested and the number of prospects)
Do I need to explain this one? How much more efficient could your marketing efforts be if you had a list of prospects that the marketing team could work on capturing? For example, we have a yacht broker client. They were attending an event overseas earlier this year and hired us to manage the preparations. Part of the process included building a list of prospects that would be at the event, learning more about those prospects, including their hobbies (this makes networking easier), and gathering details on what might be bothering them about their current situation (understanding your client’s pain point). After the event, we were able to follow up with those prospects and keep track of how well we are meeting their initial needs once they become clients.

 

These are some of the ways that we help our clients to use the budget they allocated for the year. If you would like to see our full rate card for more ideas, check it out here: abaskmarketing.com/ratecard