6 ways to maximize and expand your marketing budget

We’ve all been there - you need to do a marketing campaign, but you have limited funds due to cutbacks, reallocation of funds, business prioritization, and so on. You still need to do that marketing campaign and despite the lack of funds, you’re still required to hit your KPIs. You do a quick analysis of similar campaigns to estimate the effectiveness of your campaign and you realize that you will probably miss your KPIs.

Fret not, there are solutions! Here are some ideas how you can maximize, expand, and even increase your budget, that you may consider:

1.     Strategize and Prioritize

Planning on revamping your website? If you have the right content already, your immediate focus should be ensuring that it is mobile responsive before trying to improve the aesthetics. It may not look great but at least people are able to find your website. Imagine the opportunity cost if people are unable to access your website because it isn’t mobile responsive. No amount of pretty pictures will help.

If the results prove to be positive, you will have a case for more funds to improve it further.

2.     Separate the Wants and the Needs

Not everything is a priority, and some are just luxuries that are “nice to have”. That beautiful brand video you had planned to shoot may not be a necessity if your main objective is to drive revenue. Would those funds have been better utilized for the programmatic media buy for your flash sale that drives conversions for the business?

3.     Request for additional funds.

Yes, it may sound like a no-brainer, but you are entitled to request or more funds if it makes business sense! Of course, you will need to ensure that your request is backed up by a solid proposal. Put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re making the request to. Will you consider your proposal? How will it impact the business?

4.     Anyone with spare change?

Budgets are usually allocated based on the initial forecast and business objectives for the year. While we hope that the actual business performance works exactly as forecasted, the reality is that the market is so dynamic that it never always does work that way. Sometimes business objectives change, different initiatives move up and down the priority list, but budgets just “did not get the memo”. Hence there is sometimes an underspend in some business functions.

The consequence of potential underspends is that as budgets are usually forecasted based on the previous year’s spend, some will try to find ways to spend the remaining money in order to avoid being allocated a smaller budget for the next year.

Try to identify these potential opportunities, and similar to the point above, convince the budget holder why they should spare you some. Some have no time and manpower to spend the money, and if you can frame it such that their budget is being put to good use while helping them with their budget forecast, you may just get what you want.

5.     Partnerships

Chances are, you’re not the only one going for a certain objective. Identify these potential partners. Combine your budgets, cross-sell, co-brand, and make it a big campaign instead of a small one. Don’t be afraid to have more than one partner. After all, you want to have strength in numbers.

An example would be a financial partnership where card members of a certain bank will enjoy a fixed discount when paying for insurance premiums with that card. The only fee you would incur would be the discounted amount that card members would enjoy. The tradeoff however, is the potential additional bookings, which you may not have gotten without this discount and partnership.

Another example would be a co-branded campaign where the national tourism board, the national airport, and the national airline join budgets to launch various marketing campaigns to attract tourists to the nation. With your initial budget, perhaps you may have only been able to do one 2-day roadshow in one city with some paid social media placements for two days. However, with a bigger budget and additional resources, you are now able to do five 2-day roadshows supported by a digital marketing campaign that includes a teaser phase and some premium placements.

6.     Bartering

Similar to partnerships is the concept of bartering. Bartering is a system of exchange where goods and services are exchanged without the medium of money.

This form of partnership is most prevalent in the FMCG, Wellness, Fitness, Travel industries where products, services, and familiarization trips are provided to influencers in exchange for marketing commitments.

However, bartering is not limited to these industries. You can be creative with how you utilize your resources.

You could work with a movie production company where you guarantee a certain amount of marketing spend and usage of their upcoming movie title in your collaterals for a certain duration in exchange for rights free usage of their characters. You could have My Little Pony characters drawing rainbows with your colored pencils, Men In Black holding using your fountain pen as a neuralyzer, or Angry Birds using your safety equipment as they go onto the catapult.

Sometimes you may already have the resources. You just need to look around.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and there are many more ideas out there. As we always used to say when doing business in China, “it’s not that it can’t be done, we just haven’t come up with the solution”. Good luck!