*Clarity In Marketing

According to the National Federation of Enterprise Agencies (NFEA), business owners should not slash marketing budgets in order to cut costs, despite economic instability.

George Derbyshire, NFEA chief executive, claims that it is particularly "easy" to "take an axe to your marketing budget" when the economy is slowing down, but insisted that marketing is "more important than ever" during such a time.

Undoubtedly good advice but I suspect marketing departments will come under pressure to cut costs nonetheless. Yet I’d argue that this is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. With hard times threatened, businesses should not be looking to cut marketing budgets but to get more out of them by improving the effectiveness of campaigns.

The key to improving your marketing effectiveness is knowing your target market intimately. Understanding your target audiences’ and current customers’ wants gives you the ability to focus your campaigns and develop relevant offers they will respond to. (By the way, our online surveys provide a quick and cost effective way to find out what they are thinking right now.)

Measuring the response you get to your campaigns can then add to your understanding of your audience and it’s this knowledge that you can then use to squeeze the best possible results from your campaigns by testing refinements and comparing the results.

Simple changes lift conversions by 50%

While the best marketing teams will already be testing options for new campaigns to find what works best and successful campaigns to see if they can further improve results, many SMEs have yet to wake up to the benefits.

Here’s one example, Marketing Sherpa reports how an organic food etailer boosted conversions by 50% by testing the best delivery day and a shorter subject line for their enewsletter. Two simple tests that you can do that don’t even need to cost you anything.

How to improve your marketing results

Whilst the value of testing applies to all your marketing, it’s digital marketing where it can be most readily applied and quickly generate higher conversions. Here’s some suggestions for email and search marketing tests that could make your marketing budget work harder in an economic downturn (or at any other time).

Email tests

• Subject lines – test what you say and how many words you take to say it (under 50 characters is more likely to be opened)
• Email design –is your message getting lost because images are blocked? How much is visible in the preview screen? How do the different email clients present your design?
• Test your spam score – get more messages through by checking if your subject lines, coding or content is triggering spam filters
• Landing Pages – having worked hard to get people to click through don’t make it hard for them to convert. Do you have a strong call to action? Are the benefits of converting clearly spelt out? Is the page focused on conversion or are you distracting them with other offers?
• Hard and Soft Bounces – have you tried following up your bounced contacts – you may uncover delivery problems, get their updated email address (or that of their replacement in B2B) and maybe some business by making contact.

Search engine marketing tests

• Adwords – can you optimise your website so it lists better in organic (ie. free) search results in your top performing key phrases? Test different copy and offers. Get your thesaurus out because even changing one word can make a huge difference.
• Search Optimisation – if you haven’t reviewed your key phrases recently you may find you’re loosing traffic. Regularly checking and testing your key phrases, inbound links and search trends can help keep your business visible.
• Landing Pages – use your webstats to identify search terms people used to find your site, what page they arrived at and what they did next. If they are not staying long then they didn’t instantly (and that’s very important) spot what they were looking for. Test changes to the content or layout to see if you can keep them there longer and ultimately convert them.

If you’d like to discuss this and other ways of making your digital and traditional marketing work harder, contact Mike Lewis at Clarity In Marketing.