Don’t Limit Your Marketing Spend in These Two Areas

CoreBanners_DontLimitSpend.pngAs budget-conscious marketers, we understand just as much as any produce marketer the need to feel assured that your marketing efforts and investment of resources are going to produce ROI for your company or brand – after all, you will need to justify your decisions to ownership. But we often discover that there’s a huge Catch-22 amongst fresh produce marketers who want to achieve marketing greatness: there is no limit, in either their minds or their leadership’s minds, as to what can be done, but there’s a harsh reality as to what can be spent to get there. After all, we’ve never met a marketer with an unlimited budget!

The truth is, minimizing your marketing budget leads to favoring short-term fixes over long-term results – a strategy that will not do your brand any favors over time. Here are two areas that marketers would be wise to consider not holding back on budget.

Website Redesign

Much like buying a car, with websites you can choose to purchase the low cost/economical automobile that’s main purpose is to move you from point A to point B on a daily basis. On the other hand, you also have the option to choose the “Cadillac” version. You know, the one with all of the bells and whistles and fancy wheels that will last you much, much longer. Some may say the Cadillac is just too much money, but when you look at the potential return, it makes sense.

Consider that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive (Source: Adobe). And from a customer standpoint, more than 50% of people who are referred to a site for B2B services will rule the provider out if their website design reflects poorly on them (Source: Hinge). In other words, your website design is a direct reflection of your company, and cheap/poor designs will give and impression of just that.

So how much should you spend on a website redesign? The answer is that while there are always monetary trade-offs, your company should first understand your long-term goals and objectives and focus on the creation of a website that will help you meet these goals. This might mean a much bigger spend up front if it means you will build a site that:

  • Is custom-built to suit your company’s needs, vs. using a pre-designed template to save money.
  • Employs a content management system that will allow your team more flexibility to edit and make content updates on the site vs. contacting a designer each time you have updates.
  • Features database management capabilities that will allow you to collect your own market intelligence on both your consumers and your buyers – an investment that will deliver on invaluable tools for your sales team.

DMA Solutions chose to invest in our website long-term just last year, and we have since made additional updates to help our site better reflect ongoing growth in our company. As a result of our larger website investment, we now have a better toolkit for tracking and managing leads and the analytics and intelligence to back up our content and offerings we provide YOU.

Social Media and Public Relations (AKA Communications)

Just like with your website, your social media and public relations efforts will not yield the results you are looking for if short-term fixes and extremely limited resources are applied.

When investing in social media and PR, many marketers think about the hard costs but they often overlook the investment in time it takes to have the right, fully-equipped specialist meet your goals. Both social media and PR are relationship-driven activities that require time, more than any other thing you invest, to build and create relationships. So when we ask the same question as we did on our website (how much should I spend on social media or public relations?) we also face the same answer: you must first outline your long-term goals and objectives for each, and then identify a plan that will get you there.

If you’re a marketer currently faced with a tight budget and big dreams and goals for your marketing, we recommend prioritizing next steps by identifying the things you CAN do in the next year, 2 years, 3 years, etc. to reach your goals. With long-term decision making and thinking on your side, you can come armed each year with results and milestones that make asking for a bigger marketing budget an easy conversation.