Top Six Tips on How to Stretch a Shrinking Marketing Budget
Your costs keep rising yet your marketing budget is shrinking.
Sound familiar?
Marketing executives across the world are now searching for ways to achieve more with their marketing production budgets in this tough economic climate. So how can you stretch those funds to get the ‘best bang’ for your marketing buck?
Here are six valuable tips from the marketing experts at Orbis, a leading global provider of Marketing Management software. In a tighter economic environment limited funds must be used effectively. But balancing a decreasing marketing budget is no easy feat. Funds must stretch further and work harder. The good news is that it is possible to reduce costs and be more productive. It’s all about working smarter.
The marketing team must focus on measures to:
- Improve productivity
- Improve control
- Identify problems and take corrective action quickly
Costs can be slashed and productivity increased by:
- Increasing productivity by implementing systems to improve work flow and provide individuals with tools to work effectively.
- Refining business rules to prevent unnecessary reworking and enforce correct signoff procedures.
- Implementing automated systems with reporting facilities to help identify where the problems are so that management can take swift corrective action.
- Streamlining and preferably automating processes to improve control and efficiency
Dramatic gains can be made with the help of technology. Cutting-edge marketing software is the key.
A high quality automated marketing resource management software system offers substantial benefits including improved information flow, increased campaign visibility, sharing of assets, budget tracking and more accurate reporting. To tackle productivity challenges and deliver results for marketing production teams Orbis recommends the following:
1. Reduce production costs
You must identify and prevent wastage. Funds should be redirected to more productive outcomes. Costs may be eaten away in a production budget in many ways including:
- Reworking
- Outsourcing asset management
- Re-producing when re-using is a viable alternative
- Reducing people’s productive time through inefficient processes.
It is essential to impose discipline and business rules on clients. Insist on a maximum of three reworks on pieces to save substantial costs. Establishing a clearly defined and streamlined work-flow and approvals process can often prevent reworking disasters. Clear, consistent briefing documents may also reduce the need to rework.
2. Bring digital asset management in house
There’s no reason why digital assets can’t be stored and managed in-house. A centralized library of digital assets may be quickly and easily accessed by other areas of the organization saving time and money spent on using an agency.
3. Re-use instead of reproduce
In organizations operating globally or in diverse locations, documents, templates and pieces can be shared throughout the organization across different locations. Centralizing resources prevents duplication, streamlines transmission and contributes to overall cost and time saving.
4. Improve staff productivity
Inefficient processes waste time and prevent executives from using their real skills effectively. Automation provides structure and streamlining of processes and approvals. It provides the means to locate errors generating rework and to review them. It also contributes to individual productivity by providing quicker access to information, artwork and documents.
5. Increase speed to market
Bottlenecks in processes and inconsistency may delay print production, product launches or announcements. Lack of coordination between processes may cause missed deadlines, including vital print production. Organizational revenue depends on having a product and its promotion in the right place at the right time.
6. Take control – identify problems
In a tough economic climate, the need to improve productivity, reduce costs and increase speed to market creates high demands on the marketing production team. A few basic changes to processes and business rules will help. However, maximum business benefits will be achieved by fully utilizing an automated specialist marketing management software system.
By Grant Halloran
CEO and co-founder
Orbis Global
