The Lean Marketing Machine: 5 Cost-Cutting Ways to Succeed

As a small business owner (or anyone trying to run a business), you know that there’s never enough money to do all the things you might wish to promote your business and its products. Instead, you’re constantly making tradeoffs with operational expenses to support even a meager marketing budget. Well, today, we’ll discuss five cost-cutting ways to succeed without breaking the bank. 

Have a plan

Armed with a plan, you’re less likely to be attracted to the newest shiny object pitched by a marketing agency, SaaS developer, or in a webinar you attended last week. That doesn’t mean you ignore opportunities that weren’t in your original marketing plan, just that you consider whether the opportunities fit with that plan to add more revenue.  

As part of developing your marketing plan, consider how much money you should set aside for marketing. Some companies use an “all you can afford” tactic that often means you allocate marketing funds after considering all the other costs you will incur, resulting in too few dollars allocated toward marketing expenses. 

I often tell clients that marketing is like filling a glass. If you don’t add enough water to the glass, nothing flows over the top. The same holds true for marketing. You must allocate sufficient funds to motivate your target market to move from awareness to conversion. Without a sufficient budget, all you do is take them to somewhere along the process, which doesn’t ring the cash register. 

Look at the way other businesses allocate their marketing budget (as a percentage of forecasted sales) based on industry (see the graphic below). Use this as a starting point in determining your marketing budget. A new business might need a larger budget to break through the clutter, while an established business might get away with a lower budget. 

However, generating sales isn’t simply a function of spending money on marketing. It’s doing marketing well. That’s where the cost-cutting ways to succeed come in. So, read on!

5 cost-cutting ways to succeed

Yes, marketing is expensive. Without marketing, however, it’s impossible to reach your goals. You’ll find that you constantly struggle with too little money coming in from customers and too many operating expenses that you can’t shrink. Surely, there’s a solution!

There is. 

There are ways to get more from your marketing budget if you approach marketing with a plan and then implement that plan, rather than falling into the trap of “spray and pray,” which results in throwing your money away. Today, we’ll share five cost-cutting ways to succeed by spending your marketing budget wisely. 

1. Your customers are your best friends

Did you know it’s five times more expensive to replace an existing customer than it is to retain them in the first place? Well, it’s true. 

Thus, it’s worthwhile to consider ways to keep your existing customers happy. For instance, host customer-only events or offer loyalty points for repeat purchases. Or, have early access to sales for existing customers.

But most of all, you need to deliver the highest quality products and customer service every day if you want to turn shoppers into loyal customers. Go the extra mile for your best customers to ensure they don’t go to a competitor. Even something as simple as sending a personal note with their shipment or remembering their name when they walk into your store makes a customer feel special and keeps them coming back. 

Cost-cutting ways to succeed with existing customers come in several forms. 

1. 1. Determine customer lifetime value for your customers to group them. Those offering the highest lifetime value deserve special attention, even special offers. Those representing low (or even negative) customer lifetime value get the lowest level of service to maximize profits from them. For instance, banking customers with high balances get all kinds of perks like personal bankers and preferred interest rates, while customers who often run a small balance get very few to reduce the costs associated with serving them. This is a great cost-cutting way to succeed. 
   2. Next, let’s think about cost-cutting ways to succeed with the marketing tactics we use to reach existing customers. If you prefer, you can check out this video, which is part of my Small Business Marketing series on YouTube. 
   3. Email marketing is a low-cost tool with a high ROI. In fact, the ROI of email marketing is around $36 to $42 for every $1 spent. When you use email marketing to remind existing customers, offer them special deals, or publicize member-only events, the ROI is even higher. You can also use email as a tool to build a strong relationship with your customers by sending monthly email messages with helpful hints and suggestions. For instance, a winery can send recipes and wine pairings on a monthly basis. This ensures your products are top of mind when it comes to buying products or even encourages them to consider a purchase they hadn’t been considering. 
   4. Remarketing campaigns are also a great tool for reaching existing customers and prior visitors to your site. Remarketing involves advertising that is shown specifically to folks who interacted with your brand online. A remarketing campaign is one of the great cost-cutting ways to succeed because the return is about five times higher than other forms of digital advertising.

2. Local SEO is your oyster

Most small businesses target a local market, which makes local SEO one of the huge cost-cutting ways to succeed. 

Mastering local SEO not only sends your content to the top of related search results, but it also means you have an enhanced listing, like the ones shown below. 

• Start with a complete profile on Google My Business, which is free.
• Encourage customers to leave reviews and post pictures on your profile. 
• Maintain your profile by updating hours, photos, and business descriptions as your business changes. 
• Respond to both satisfied customers and those with complaints as soon as possible. 
• You can add posts to your profile to share updates, offers, or new products. 

3. Content is king

When it comes to digital marketing, think about helping prospects and customers rather than interrupting them with your ads. Content marketing is one of the cost-cutting ways to succeed because it not only encourages visitors to purchase your products by pointing out their benefits over the competition and offering ways to get the most from them, but content marketing also helps attract new visitors by impacting your SEO, so you show up near the top in related digital searches. This organic search result is extremely effective as a marketing tool (see image below).

Creating content is time-consuming and may be expensive, but new AI tools like Gemini ($20/month), Canva, and ChatGPT can ease the burden significantly by helping with image creation, infographics, and writing first drafts of your content across multiple platforms. These tools can even suggest topics and headlines based on your chosen keywords. 

Creating great content is easy when you know how. Here are some tips: 

• • Use a variety of content types, including text, video, images, and infographics
  • Write long-form content (blog posts) at least once a week, post to social media daily
  • Focus on creating valuable content for your target market. For instance, answer common questions you encounter or craft a simple how-to post
  • Encourage user-generated content, especially on social media, with contests and other tools
  • Consider SEO when you craft content by using long-tailed keywords and focusing on user intent when they formulate a query. If SEO is a foreign concept for you, here’s a brief infographic that walks you through the process:
    

    

• Share your content everywhere, such as in email messages, social media, and repurpose it as a video or image. As cost-cutting ways to succeed go, this makes the most of your content creation efforts.

4. Social media is your friend

While it’s true that organic social media is going the way of the dodo bird, a sustained social media effort still delivers for small businesses, where building a community still delivers rewards.

Meanwhile, advertising on social media works as cost-cutting ways to succeed go. For a few dollars a day, you can reach a vast number of social media users if you employ effective targeting.

5. Partnerships lead to success

You don’t have to go it alone as a small business owner. Consider teaming up with other local businesses to optimize your success. Not only do these partnerships provide access to a new (hopefully similar) market, but they also spread the costs of promotions across multiple firms. 

For instance, a winery might host a food truck to bring in the clientele that the food truck attracts, thus introducing a new audience to your wines. Or a retailer might work with other nearby businesses to craft an event, like a petting zoo, to attract customers. By sharing the advertising and other expenses, as well as publicizing the collaboration through each firm’s email marketing and social media, the firms generate higher sales for everyone without cannibalizing each other’s efforts. 

Conclusion

You don’t need a big marketing budget; you just need to employ some or all of these cost-cutting ways to succeed. Strategies like targeting existing customers, mastering local search, creating valuable content, and building partnerships with other businesses.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.