Online Marketing Budgets – Making the Most of Yours

When you’re running a small business every penny can be a prisoner, which is why it’s critical that you spend your marketing budget wisely.

Below you’ll find 5 useful tips on how to make the most of your online marketing budget;

• Relevance is king

When it comes to online marketing, relevance is king. There’s no point in paying for traffic to your website that’s not interested in your service or product. It’s far better to have 100 visitors a month who want what you offer, than 1000 visitors who aren’t your target market. The more relevant your online marketing is the greater return on investment you’ll achieve.

• Test things out first

What works well for one business online may not necessarily work well for yours. Therefore it’s advisable to test out a variety of marketing activities first with a small percentage of your overall budget so you can evaluate what is likely to bring you the best returns. Many online marketing strategies can be tested and evaluated in the short term, such as email marketing, pay per click and online press releases.

• Use free online marketing tools

If your marketing budget is small in terms of finance but you have time available, then there are a number of free online marketing tools you can use including blogging, social media, article writing and link building. Even though you’re not investing any money in these areas, it’s still a good idea to assign a value to your time so you can measure whether or not each of them are worthwhile in terms of ROI.

• Measure results regularly

No small business can afford to throw money down the drain so it’s vital that you measure your marketing results on a regular basis. For example, if you’re running a pay per click campaign you may get a high number of conversions one week and then hardly any the next; this could be due to a variety of factors so it’s important you monitor your results closely and tweak your campaign to avoid wasting money.

• Spend part of your budget on training

If you don’t know your PPC from your SEO and have never done any online marketing before, it’s wise to allocate part of your marketing budget to training. Rather than paying someone else to do your online marketing for you or trying it yourself and wasting your budget, it can be beneficial to attend training courses so that you can do all your own online marketing yourself in future years and make your budget go further.

If you liked this article you may also be interested in reading how to measure your online marketing ROI

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 12:15 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.