Keeping your marketing budget low, but your impact high

In business, good marketing is the key to success, and if we can figure out how to keep our marketing budget low, but our marketing impact high, we'll have quite an advantage over our competitors. We'll be spending less on our marketing campaigns, leaving us with extra money to focus elsewhere, while still maintaining high marketing standards, visibility, effectiveness, and success rates. Let's look then at some ways in which we can keep our marketing budget low, but our marketing impact high.

- When trying to keep our marketing budget low, but our marketing impact high, we'll first need to discover what our best, most proven methods of marketing are, and this will of course depend exactly on what it is we're marketing. Let's say that we're marketing lectures on subjects such as Western Philosophy, Shakespeare, U.S. History, and so forth. There's a lot of interest in such products these days, as people are becoming increasingly interested in improving their educations while driving, working out, or whatever.

- We're marketing, then, educational lectures that can be downloaded onto an iPod, cd, and so forth. Now, the goal is to keep our marketing budget low, but our marketing impact high. This means that we've got to take a close look at all the areas in which we're currently marketing out educational lectures. Let's say we're marketing our educational lectures in general interest magazines such as Time, on television shows such as The Discovery Program, in the Arts and Letters section of certain daily newspapers, on talk radio, on the sites of certain online bookstores, and so forth.

- We're aiming to keeping our marketing budget low, but our marketing impact high. We've got to discover which of the marketing venues mentioned above are bringing in the most potential customers. Now, there are lots of ways of doing this, and some of them of course are built right into the specific marketing strategy itself, but it doesn't hurt to explore options such as introducing a brief poll when a customer orders one of our products through the mail, Internet, whatever, asking simply: "Where did you hear about us?" And then you give a little list of options.

- Through this process, we discover which of our current marketing methods are bringing in the most customers. And then, in the spirit of keeping our marketing budget low, but our marketing impact high, we put more time and money into the more productive marketing methods, and either slow down our involvement with the less effective ones or cease dealing with them entirely.

- If we can go from ten different ways of marketing our educational lectures to five, but those five ways are proven ways, we've taken a massive step forward in keeping our marketing budge low, but our marketing impact high. We're no longer spending money on less effective ways of marketing, and we're no longer spending time on less effective ways of marketing. Instead, we can focus all our energies on the effective ways of marketing, and in the meantime we're saving significant amounts of money that can (a) be put into other areas of the business or (b) put into those marketing strategies we've decided to stick with.

- Again, the idea of keeping our marketing budget low, while keeping our marketing impact high, is to spend less time and less money with less effective marketing strategies, and more time and more money on more effective marketing strategies. Doing such a thing isn't as easy as it sounds, as it will take quite a lot of work to separate the less effective from the more effective and to focus on the latter while disengaging from the former. Doing so is well worth the effort, however, as businesses thrive on such efforts.