5 Crazy Effective Ways To Spend Your 2019 Marketing Budget

Do you want to spend money on marketing – but only want it to be on the things that will provide an actual return on investment? A good average for marketing return is 1:5 – meaning if you do it well, spending 1 dollar on marketing should lead to $5 in revenue!

Here are 5 ways to make 1 dollar turn into 5 (or 10k turn into 50k.) 

1. EVENT MARKETING + INFLUENCERS

Host an event, but ensure you have it stacked with 2-3 or more people in the niche of your ideal customer that can draw a crowd. How big that crowd needs to be can help you figure out if you need to pay these influencers, just have them speak, or something more dramatic or involved.

Events are massive, because face to face interaction is massive. We’re so much more likely to do business with people we like, know, and trust – and events can help us establish all three. 

2. PAID SEARCH – EXPANDED EXACT MATCH KEYWORDS

Paying Google for your search terms is so 2000-and-late… or is it? If you don’t keep a tight rein on your keywords, Google will spend up your budget before you get any ROI. However, if you use “expanded exact match” or this format – Keyword+Other+Terms, all of the keywords have to be present, and it keeps the searches you’re showing up for focused. Paying for your top 20-50 keywords / phrases in Google is still relevant now – and powerful (in the right niche.

3. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION + HEAVY DUTY CONTENT PIECES

If your site is not set up well to be easily crawled by search engines – it’s extremely important that you get it fixed as soon as possible.

SEO is no longer a “nice to have,” it’s baseline marketing – because people are using search engines constantly, it’s important to consistently be improving your website, getting links back to your website, and regularly build out content intentionally for people searching on Google – just to PARTICIPATE in the internet today.

Not to mention it has one of the highest perception for return on investment in a recent poll of marketing leaders. Push for bigger, deeper, and more intentional content targeting + build out serious resources that will attract people from search engines.

4. PAID SOCIAL

THE ATTENTION is on social – Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are 2-3 hour a day habits for people under 35. Are you meeting them where they are?

Are you doing everything in your power and monetary limits to stay top of mind? From promoting posts with your best content – to re-marketing on Facebook and instagram for brand awareness (ideally with video), or just doing A/B tests with your best offers.

Hint: The CREATIVE is the absolute most important part – how are you SNATCHING their attention with spot-on headlines and images, and what are you doing to attract the next step. For services based business – I strongly suggest pushing for real consultations, rather than just downloads when possible – as it’s easy to waste a lot of money on leads that don’t close if you just offer a download.

 5. RE-MARKETING + ‘GEO-TARGETED’ DISPLAY ADS

When someone tells me they aren’t re-marketing (also known as retargeting) – I’m always scared they are leaving money on the table.

Re-marketing is when you visit a site and then that company’s ads follow you around for the next week, and clicks for that advertiser are so much cheaper than normal ad clicks because you’re much more likely to click on something you’ve already expressed interest in. Google’s Ad network + Facebook are great places to do re-marketing, and it’s also easier than ever to target specific geographic areas on these platforms than ever.

Have a higher concentration of ideal customers on Lake Minnetonka? Enter the cities surrounding it in your Google ad targeting, and serve a compelling ‘free consultation’ image ad to them. Wherever your ideal customers are – target their location (and types of websites they are visiting!) Ads are getting more powerful – more granular than ever, and if you aren’t taking advantage of some of these targeting options that are available to everybody – you’re missing the window when it’s such a great deal.

Want a non-judgemental, honest assessment of where you should spend your 2019 digital marketing budget? Send us a message now, and we can talk through what’s most important for marketing YOUR BUSINESS – even if it’s not appropriate to hire us!

HOW DO YOU DETERMINE WHAT THE R.O.I OF YOUR MARKETING ACTIVITIES ARE?

You need ‘attribution.’

Figure out how to track everything – figure out where leads are coming from and make sure it’s all tracked. If you have analytics conversions in place, that’s a great step, but you need to find how many event leads you’re getting – and ideally what percentage of your leads are closing!

I’ve seen companies drop 10-15K on paid ads, and get 100 leads thinking they were winning. 

Only to go back through all the leads, and not one of them had closed. 

At that point, you need to determine the closing ratio for each one of your marketing activities are:

• Determine the average ‘customer lifetime value’ or CLV.
• Determine the percentage of leads that turn into sales for each channel of marketing.
• Find out how much you spent on each avenue of marketing for this past year.
• Now calculate the return on investment – feel free to use our SEO ROI Calculator, for projecting SEO ROI. 

WHAT WILL DETERMINE WHETHER THESE MARKETING ACTIVITIES WILL BE WILDLY SUCCESSFUL?

You need to find which activities and what efforts are giving a significant ROI.

Then – you need to put habits or a systematic approach into these efforts.

I’m absolutely convinced that without a systematic approach (and ‘bumpers’ or – calendar reminders, other systems for accountability) that it’s very hard to keep your highest ROI marketing activities consistently churning out solid numbers of leads and new business.

If this next year is all about experimentation – than so be it, but the ultimate goal is to get to 3-5 key ‘heavy duty’ marketing activities that you know you can push into at any time and get a good result from – here are 3 of mine:

• Writing useful and keyword targeted blog posts for our ideal customers.
• Taking a referral partner, somebody in a company like ours, or ideal customer to lunch (or going to an event) and giving value.
• Creating a specific, targeted ad that corresponds with a useful resource or landing page on our site.

If you already know what your ‘high return’ habits are – it’s time to double down on those that are working – and try to shed the busy-work that’s not creating a return. If it’s not producing leads – stop mechanically spending time there.

If you haven’t yet – definitely check out our recent post: “How to Get Results Fast as a Crazy Awesome Marketing Director” for more!