10 strategies to reduce advertising costs and achieve high ROI

For many small businesses, advertising costs are a difficult burden to bear. Advertising exposes the goods or services that a company offers and can help set a business apart from its competition. Advertising is a critical business process in many businesses, as many of them rely on advertising to maintain client traffic, but some small business owners may find the cost of a consistent advertising presence to be overwhelming, particularly in today’s weak economy. Here are some suggestions to assist you save advertising expenses without sacrificing advertising effectiveness. 

1. Never entertain the idea of wasting money
   Money is a scarce resource, in the midst of unending business needs. Never entertain the idea that you can just throw away money and hope to benefit. Be clear about what you are investing in any advertising project, how you will do it and what you anticipate. Whether you are funding an event, or running a social buzz, you’re bound to bear the burden of unnecessarily high advertising costs if you have no clarity of purpose. Somewhere later, your action will catch up when you are in deep need of that money to conduct a highly converting advertising campaign, but you wasted precious resources earlier on low converting initiatives.
2. Make your marketing targeted
   The biggest mistake many businesses make over and over is to try and make marketing campaigns that speak everything to everyone. The problem with this is that such adverts end up delivering minimal ROI in comparison to the advertising costs because almost none of the people who come across such campaign materials find the advert communicating what they need accurately. A targeted marketing campaign is made up of targeted adverts that speak in no uncertain terms and in a compelling manner to certain people, making them take further steps to know more.
3. Work primarily with one graphics designer/ designing company. 
   One of the biggest advantages of working with one designer is that they understand what your brand needs, and can be able to imagine how they can make your adverts creative even in their dreams. It also gives consistency of result, and enables your company to gain bargaining leverage for advertising costs optimization, so that by supplying more work to one designer, you can bargain for discounts and better rates.
4. Leverage the use of themes
   The use of themes is an important strategy in marketing and advertising. Themes help the marketing team and the creatives to develop and sustain focus in order to deliver specific messages to specific audiences in the most effective manner possible. Such targeted approaches go a long way to compelling visitors and the target audience to take specific actions. It also inspires highly targeted creativity that strikes the right nerve among the target audience.
   
5. Cut the advertising costs of each ad by half
   Okay okay before you disagree, here is why and how it works. Many times advertising costs are decided on a presumption basis, that is, prediction, which is almost never accurate in terms of the ROI. Sometimes, it works to take the risk and try whether cutting the budget still delivers the same or slightly insignificantly lower results. Imagine realizing you can achieve the same results you are achieving now at half the advertising cost. Instead of being convinced and sticking to what you have known all along, greater results can come from testing an alternative hypothesis.
6. Reduce your advertising frequency
   Maybe, just maybe, your business success is not based on the many times you have your advertising content out there. Maybe a different way to approach your advertising is to have such a buzz that you don’t have to post anything else for 3 months until that buzz dies down. Or maybe, you can create such an effective advertising strategy supported by user generated content that your work is just to start and let the fire burn on its own. Just saying, it could be a possibility you know. Some good partners to collaborate with in creating a marketing buzz are millennials.
   Read also: Marketing to millennials; consumer strategies and characteristics of success
7. Explore more than one way of advertising
   Again, avoid the temptation to be stuck with only what you know, and fear exploring new ways. There are more than 10 ways to market and advertise your brand, and a perfectly well blended mixture of these methods can be the recipe that drives higher conversion rates. Some of these methods include, video advertising on TV, advertising on radio, advertising on social media, advertising on public transport, advertising on emails, SMS advertising, cold calling, sponsoring events and so many more. This exploration is likely to uncover more cost-effective methods that have higher returns and sustainability than current methods, necessitating a change of strategy to keep advertising costs under your control.
8. Dominate the cheapest advertising channels
   Did you know you can achieve great marketing results from cheap, very cheap advertising channels? Hmm, well the definition of cheap changes from one entity to the other, but a classical definition of cheap is where a company spends petty cash to make things happen. Dominating advertising channels that can be managed from the petty cash budget can go a long way to motivating success. Such channels include public relations (PR) from the company through statements and press conferences as well as word-of-mouth referrals, and can go a long way in helping keep your advertising costs in check..
9. Take your advertising digital
   There is no better way to emphasize that if a company is not selling online, it is simply making a plan of not selling at all. Missing on digital marketing platforms, unless it is strategic, puts a company at grave danger of burning cash and not achieving the anticipated ROI. In this modern generation, studies of consumer behavior show a total of 5.03 billion people around the world use the internet today – equivalent to 63.1 percent of the world’s total population. Taking your marketing on digital platforms gives the advantage of being able to access more people, in a cheaper way, at convenient times and places without having to plaster the whole world with your marketing content.
   Read also: 13 types of digital marketing channels in modern marketing
10. Remember it’s a two-way traffic
    One of the other big mistakes that companies find themselves in is making advertising all about themselves, and forgetting to make it a platform to speak to customers and be spoken to by customers. Advertising is more of dialogue or partnership than a monologue. Advertising that is more buyer/customer-driven has way more higher chances of effectiveness than advertising that is solely seller-driven.

We hope you have a clearer understanding of a few strategies that can help keep advertising costs under your control, and you can save more money for your business development projects.

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