Whatever business you have, nothing feels better than lowering your bottom line while maintaining an impact. However you conduct your next marketing campaign, you will want to aim to have the highest return on your investment possible. One of the best ways of doing that is by making concerted and strategic efforts to save money. As long as you don’t cut corners, this should improve your ROI. Depending on how big your campaign plan is, small changes can save hundreds or even thousands of pounds. Here are some top tips that professional marketers use to keep their costs low.  

1. Make Sure your Data Pools are Functioning Properly

If you have been doing your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) properly, you will have at least two data pools: your existing customers and your prospective customers. However, unless you are well trained in CRM and are very organized, it can be easy for your data to fall into a bad condition. This is sometimes known as ‘dirty data’ and involves your customer information being outdated, scrappy, and difficult to process. A very common example of dirty data includes a database not being consistent – something that is easy enough to understand if a human is crawling the database but very difficult for a machine to process and automate. 

How do you know if your data is out of date? Some marketers estimate data can become less accurate by as much as 30 percent per year, due to people changing their details (moving city, moving house, changing phones etc.). 

But what harm can ‘dirty data’ do? Well, if your data is out of date, you can be wasting money. If 30% of your data is out of date, you will be throwing away 30% of your marketing budget immediately. That’s huge. Cleaning data up isn’t hard either – companies like the Royal Mail offer customers well-priced, accurate, and well-formatted data. If it costs less than 30% of your marketing budget, you’re immediately making an ROI from one purchase in one campaign. 

2. Find Accurate ways to Monitor Performance

You will have a marketing team, even if it is just one other person giving you a hand (if not, you almost definitely need some help). Hiring staff can be intimidating because it’s such a large investment, so you need to be fully on top of your spending versus what you expect in return. You should have a clear strategy before you hire anybody and, with that strategy, you should define what they are supposed to achieve. Once you hire them, you will need to monitor their performance so you can tell if they are on track or not. 

It’s important from their side, too – without clear objectives and definitive ways of meeting those objectives, they will find it more difficult to perform to their highest potential. If you have no experience in setting and monitoring HR metrics, you can always outsource this work. You’ll need to find an agency that can help you, like this HR Dept in South London, which offers staff performance appraisals, as well as record keeping through software. 

3. Find Symbiosis with Current Customers Wherever Possible

It is perfectly natural for a business to look at finding new business, but keep in mind that it costs 500% more to acquire a new customer than it does to bring an existing customer back for more. Take a look at your planned conversion funnel for your next marketing campaign (if you don’t have one – make one as soon as possible, it’s a vital tool). Distill that funnel down to your core marketing aims – do you want to raise awareness, increase your ROI, increase revenue, or something else? 

Now, analyze your goals and ask yourself a simple question: can this goal be achieved with my existing customers? If the answer is yes, you should focus on your existing customers as a priority. If there is a ‘but’ after the yes, you should look into a mixed strategy targeting both new and existing customers. This does require a bit more organization but remember, you will save 5 times as much money if you target existing customers, so additional costs incurred are normally worth it, especially if you’re looking at a big campaign. 

These three actions are relatively straightforward, but actually achieving them can be a bit of effort. You need to remember the bottom line as you enact these strategies – they will have a very real effect on your net profit, so they are worth significant energy and attention from you and others at your company.