5 Ways to Do More with Less

Marketers are under tremendous pressure. They’re charged with achieving growth in the midst of an unforgiving economy. Remaining competitive in a global marketplace full of lower cost providers. Finding ways to garner meaningful insights about their audiences. Measuring the value of their marketing efforts.

Marketers are especially challenged to do more with less. Delivering greater results on a flat or even reduced budget from the previous year is unfortunately a mandate our clients are routinely given from their senior management. But there are ways to stretch your dollars further. Here are a few ideas:

1) Cast out waste
Comb through your marketing budget and find “money drainers” with questionable returns. Trade shows are a big one I often hear from clients. Between the cost for booth space, booth graphics, shipping, travel expenses and entertaining customers, it really adds up. And often times too few leads are generated. Think about what you can do virtually – webinars, white papers and eNewsletters are all great ways to stay in front of your customers and prospects, at much lower cost.

2) Measure your people
Start applying metrics to your employees and new hires to reduce staffing waste. Large amounts of money are often spent in recruiting, hiring and training new employees, some of whom turn out to be bad hires because they weren’t properly screened and evaluated in the first place.

Encourage your HR department to employ more scientific hiring methods to weed out those underperformers, which will shift the performance curve so you’re hiring better performers and getting greater productivity with reduced headcount. Stop going with your gut on new hires, and apply metrics just as you would in operations, marketing or any other area of your business.

3) Don’t forget Pareto
Remember the old Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule? It’s the idea that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Well, it can be applied to just about everything, from economics to warehouse management to crime statistics. The truth is, most things in life are not distributed evenly. But how can you use it to help you do more with less? By realizing that only 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your results. Identify those things that fall into the 20% category and focus your energy on them. Don’t waste your time worrying about tasks that don’t generate results. Conversely, don’t let things slip that are a part of the 20%.

4) Track, track, track
Implement a way to track every single marketing initiative you are doing. Subscribe to an analytics package such as Google Analytics or WebTrends. Implement a call tracking service that assigns unique phone numbers to each piece of communication you produce.

Utilize third party ad serving to provide unbiased reports on impressions and click throughs for your online advertising. Create links with unique tracking URLs within your emails and eNewsletters so you can see what content is driving traffic to your site.

Only with tracking in place will you be able to see what results are being generated and at what cost. Which leads me to my next point.

5) All hail the dashboard
Create an analytics dashboard to capture all metrics from your marketing activities. Include open rates, click through rates (CTR), view conversions, pages/visit, average time on site, goal completions and bounce rate, to name a few.

Then add your media spend to determine the cost per contact (how much you’re spending to motivate someone to raise their hand, as defined by a phone call, goal completion on your site or other metric). Then close the loop by adding leads generated to figure out the cost per lead.

In going through this exercise for of our clients we discovered that their print campaign was generating very few responses compared to other media, yet it accounted for over 50% of their budget. While it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone, the data led us to promptly recommend they cancel the remainder of the schedule and divert those funds to media that was generating greater response. The dashboard enabled us to add value by recommending smarter use of our client’s budget, thereby stretching their dollars further. A win-win for all.

Challenge yourself to work smarter and more efficiently. Please share your ideas below for how you answer the challenge of doing more with less.