One of the crucial factors for success in marketing is efficiency. You need to spend your dollars efficiently, you need to spend your time efficiently, and you need to make sure that all your efforts are worth it.
But what exactly does the path to greater marketing efficiency look like? And how can you take the first step on that journey?
The Power of Efficiency in Marketing
Why should you care that your marketing is efficient? Most business decision makers treat efficiency as an a priori good, as they should, but it’s important to realize what the practical benefits really are.
There are a few different ways to think about efficiency in your marketing approach. You can think of it in terms of dollars, making sure that every dollar you spend yields the biggest possible impact. You can think of it in terms of time, making sure that your leaders and employees are spending their working hours in ways that ultimately benefit your long-term marketing plans. You can even think about it in terms of individual tactics and messages, optimizing the content you produce to have the biggest possible impact.
In all these cases, efficiency allows you to do more with less. It means you can save time, save money, and maximize results simultaneously, ultimately resulting in a bigger profit for your business.
The Role of Leadership
If you’re interested in making changes to improve your marketing efficiency, you should start from the top and work your way down. It’s important to have experienced, savvy marketing leaders in place who can see the organization’s efforts from a high level and institute the types of changes necessary to increase the efficiency of operations.
For many organizations, this leader will be the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). If you don’t have a traditional CMO in place or if your current CMO is overworked or distracted, you may consider hiring a fractional CMO. The title and typical responsibilities of the person don’t matter as much as their ability to make good decisions on behalf of the entire marketing department.
Options for Marketing Efficiency
These are some of the best strategies for improving your marketing efficiency:
· Elimination of wasted dollars. Pay close attention to any areas where you might be wasting dollars, as these aren’t always obvious. For example, are you paying for two different marketing tools that essentially do the same thing? If so, you can probably eliminate one of them. Are you paying too much for a third-party vendor, when you could be getting the same level of service for less? Are you wasting money chasing down extremely competitive keywords to rank for in SEO, when you could be targeting much more efficient terms?
· Elimination of wasted time. Similarly, you need to identify and eliminate areas of wasted time. It’s important to invest time if you want a high-quality marketing strategy, but you need to make sure that time is spent productively. There’s no need to spend 10 hours on research when 3 hours will suffice – and there’s no reason to waste countless hours in daily huddle meetings if they aren’t actually improving focus or productivity.
· Asset utilization. It’s possible, and often advantageous to reuse your best marketing assets, so consider doing it. For example, you can develop an eBook, then split that eBook into pieces and publish it in the form of blog posts, social media posts, and even interactive videos. If you’re only using your best content once and in a limited capacity, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
· Increased relevance. Marketing becomes much more impactful when you increase the relevance of your messaging. That means digging deep to better understand your target audience and showing them exactly the types of messages that will resonate with them.
· Differentiation. You can also streamline efficiency by differentiating yourself. There’s no reason to fight directly with a competitor when you can set yourself apart from them or avoid them by targeting a different demographic.
· Diversification. Also consider diversifying your marketing portfolio, pursuing many strategies simultaneously so you can benefit from the complementary advantages of each.
· AB testing. AB testing is one of the best ways to get more value out of your marketing efforts, since it allows you to experiment and collect data about the effectiveness of your tactics. The more you conduct these types of tests, the more you’ll learn about your target audience, and the more effective your strategies are going to become.
Once you improve your marketing efficiency, you’ll be able to see better results while spending less time and money. There’s no such thing as a perfectly efficient marketing department, so always be on the lookout for new modes of optimization and new strategies that can help you increase your overall ROI.
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