10 Ways to Completely Blow Your Marketing Budget
In a few short years, marketing options have increased exponentially equally multiplying the avenues for blowing a budget. Since totally mastering all the marketing channels to nullify this risk would be an exercise in futility, it becomes apparent that even as an experienced marketer, you can still easily blow your budget. Here are 10 surefire ways to completely blow your marketing budget that you should be wary of
Focusing on many platforms
The more you spread your advertising dollars across platforms, the higher the probability of wasting your budget. This is especially so if you are in charge of marketing in a big company or firm. The key lies in decentralizing the marketing, and creating sub-departments to deal with platform specific marketing tasks. This way, though you will need more manpower, specialized expertise will reduce the chances of budget loss due to inexperience and errors.
If yours is a small venture, choose at most two primary advertising channels such as Facebook and Instagram and stick to them until the business grows enough to merit expansion onto other platforms and increasing the marketing team.
An unrefined conversion funnel
Your marketing approach should be well calibrated to reduce traffic leaks. You may have excellent lead generation tactics, for instance, but drop the ball when it comes to priming leads with highly targeted content, rendering all your efforts in vain.
Be a prudent and shrewd planner and structure an ideal conversion trajectory for potential customers. Then, you will know who is where, and what to feed who to propel conversions and maximize ROI.
Overambitious marketing
Your marketing approach should take into account the capability of your enterprise to handle new business. It would be a big loss to spend big and effectively on marketing only for your website to crash, or your business system to fail – leaving hundreds of potential customers high and dry.
The aggressiveness of your marketing, therefore, should correspond to your ability to satisfactorily service new customers.
Tradeshows
In some niches, tradeshows are an excellent method of generating leads, but in others, they are only attended by vendors. Before hiring tradeshow space and spending your budget on assembling a killer stand, ask yourself whether you would be getting better value for your marketing dollars elsewhere. Tradeshows are simply not as popular as they once were; yet, they are just as expensive if not more expensive.
Giving free goodies
People love free stuff, but the kind of free stuff that you give in the name of marketing matters a lot. If it is something people have no need for or interest in, it will certainly end up in the trash can. Company labelled keychains, paperweights, and stickers are good examples.
Give stylish t-shirts with a catchy phrase, pens, notebooks, charging cables, and such. The more useful, the better. Even better, shun the free stuff approach, and give discounts instead. They make for greater marketing copy and generate more interest.
Not accounting for robots and fraud in PPC
Remaining ignorant of bots and click fraud is a sure way to blow your budget. If you do not institute security measures, you may be pumping your money into holes. In 2017, fake traffic and fraud was estimated to have cost advertisers an eye watering $6.3 billion!
Click fraud mainly affects PPC and considering that in AdWords some keywords can cost up to $50 per click, it is easy to see that a lot of money is at stake. According to a survey from Incapsula, a staggering 52.8% of internet traffic was from robots! In your data, always account for robot traffic and fraud.
Spending on banner ads
Banner ads have one of the least click-through rates in digital advertising with an average of 0.12%. People have become so accustomed to them that they have learned to tune them out. Even worse, display ads are the most affected by ad blocking which has grown by over 100% since 2015. A staggering 56% of banner ads are not seen by humans. If you can, avoid them all together.
Direct mail advertising
Direct mail marketing is not only costly at an average of $50 per lead but also very inefficient. It has a poor ROI and most of the mail ends up in junk folders in your audiences’ email addresses. Research shows that 44% of direct marketing mail is not even opened. Email marketing provides a better alternative with an average ROI of 4300% at a fraction of the cost.
Buying big advertising space for short durations
It takes several viewings for people to remember a brand which means that splurging on a big ad placement for a day or two at the expense of smaller ad placements for longer is a bad idea. This is a costly mistake that many small businesses make. Moreover, small ads which run for longer have the added benefit of yielding more data which comes in handy in decision making.
Spending a lot early on
When a company is still young, it is always a good idea to go slow on the marketing. Do not start by paying an arm and a leg for a fancy logo and other excellent but unneeded supporting artworks. Since at the outset the risk of mistakes is high, if a lot of money is imprudently committed, a lot can be lost. Thus, it is a good idea to be minimalistic at the beginning.
There are more ways than can be adequately covered by this article on how to blow your marketing budget. To avoid doing so comes down to shrewdness, espousing research, and ensuring that as much as possible, marketing decisions are data backed. Learning from those more experienced in the field, such as ppchire.com, is recommended.