Nov 19 2009
To spend or not to spend - what to do with your marketing budget in 2010…..
You may be one of the lucky companies at the moment who is asking themselves “What should I do with my marketing spend in 2010?” Many companies have battened down the hatches in the mistaken view that doing nothing will somehow stand them in good stead for when the British recession is finally over.
So what to do with your marketing spend next year, no matter how limited? Should you ditch more traditional marketing methods and tactics and focus on digital? Is it really cheaper and the only way ahead?
As strategic marketing consultants, we’re not only seeing a large number of our clients with reduced marketing spend for next year but with a renewed desire to really make every penny count. That’s the beauty of digital marketing – it’s highly traceable and transparent. But does that mean that more traditional marketing has no place? Some would argue that digital isn’t that new either – we’re all blogging, broadcasting emails and podcasting every day anyway. Digital is such a huge medium, which is still developing, it’s hard to generalise anymore. Also the cost associated with going to market with digital varies so much, even more so than traditional marketing methods - and in many cases can actually be more expensive.
The key focus for getting the most out of your carefully guarded marketing budget has to be integration – choosing the best online and offline marketing for your particular requirement at any given moment. Measuring the success of each will then always remain crucial, without resorting to just bean counting the number of clicks you’ve got to your website.
Marketing is too varied and too complicated to generalise down to simply “Should I go digital or traditional,” and going for the cheapest option has never been the strategic choice of a winner anyway. What works for one company, or indeed product, will not necessarily work for another. With the vast choice of channels we now have on offer, the real skill is in using the appropriate channel at the appropriate time. In short, staying very well informed is the only way forward. This is how we work as strategic marketing consultants – we aim to find the best solution, be it the development and implementation of a traditional direct mail campaign or an internet marketing strategy, ideally combining the best that both have to offer to achieve the very best results for our clients.
