Businesses have to make hard financial decisions every day. Sometimes that means letting go of an employee or cutting back on extra spending during the holidays or for company retreats. Many times businesses have to make the difficult decision to cut back on the budgets in certain departments, which can mean that projects are canceled, or even worse, marketing efforts are stalled.
Many business owners and operators decide to cut marketing when times get tough, and sales are slow, but this can prove to be harmful to business overall. Marketing is the department that fuels the sales of your business by providing valuable data on customer behaviors and desires, expertise in branding and advertising avenues that are best suited for your business, and the competitive edge against competitors in commodity markets. Cutting your marketing budget could mean that you are cutting off the life support of your business during hard times.
Here are three reasons why you should never cut your marketing budget.
You Need to Maintain Visibility
The marketplace is cluttered and loud. With so many brands competing for the attention of your potential customers, why would you make yourself invisible and silent by slowing down your marketing efforts? The idea for a competitive brand is to be top-of-mind at all times. The last thing you want to do is lose out on sales because your customers forgot about you and moved on to the next brand that is clearly visible in the market.
Not to mention, if you stop posting or disappear from popular marketing channels like social media, where people regularly go to check the vitality of businesses, customers and potential clients who are looking for you may think that you’ve gone out of business.
Proper use of ad dollars should be going toward increasing your visibility, not decreasing it, especially in hard times when there may be less competition. You want to be the brand that everyone knows and recognizes, not the forgotten brand without a voice.
Marketing is an Investment
When you have developed and implemented a complete marketing strategy for your company, you should also be collecting data on clients and customers and the metrics of campaigns in order to decide what works and doesn’t. All of this data collection and strategizing is an investment in your business. If you choose to cut your marketing dollars, you are essentially cutting off the investment into your business, which can have devastating consequences in the long run.
Do you want to be the only company in your industry or region that is without market data from a specific time period? If this was a purely financial transaction, would you be willing to lose the money you had already invested and forfeit future gains?
Stop thinking of marketing as a money bleed in your company, and start thinking of it as an investment into the current and future success of your business. The effort you are putting into it now will pay off in the long run if you are consistent and calculated with the implementation of your overall strategy. You don’t want to lose any momentum, or investment, that you’ve already built through marketing your brand.
Don’t Cut, Readjust
You won’t ever get the best return on your marketing dollars unless you fully understand your customer base and the audience you are marketing to on a daily basis. This information is critical to the success of your marketing efforts and your overall business. After all, would you let your sales guys waste their time trying to sell to people who don’t even need your product?
Marketing works the same way. If you feel like you are not getting the most bang for your buck with your marketing budget, you are likely marketing to the wrong crowd or in the wrong way. Instead of cutting your budget, you should readjust your strategy. Perhaps your target audience fluctuates by season or year, or maybe their desires for products in your industry has changed. Research to find out how you can best adjust your marketing dollars. Perhaps your fix is as simple as finding a new target audience that is simply unaware of your offerings. Once you readjust, make sure you maintain visibility and a consistent brand presence for the full benefit of your marketing dollars.
If you are struggling with a marketing strategy for your company, give us a call at Miss Ink. We can assist you with your online and content marketing strategy to get you back in the game.
References:
3 Reasons Why You Should Never Cut Your Marketing Budget. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/marketing/3-reasons-why-you-should-never-cut-your-marketing-budget-0521964
McKewen, E. (n.d.). 4 Reasons to KEEP Your Marketing Budget. Retrieved from https://www.cmtc.com/blog/4-reasons-to-keep-your-marketing-budget
