Marketing on a tight budget

To gain maximum benefit from your marketing budget, it's important to review and evaluate it regularly. Any time and money you spend on marketing is an investment in your business. So you need to make sure it's time and money well spent.

Last year's figures

Examine your marketing spend against sales and revenue. Consider the campaigns you were running during periods of high and low sales.

Some kinds of marketing activities are easier to measure than others. For example, a pay-per-click ad can show you how much you spent against the value of a sale. Activities like public relations may influence consumers' attitudes, but it's hard to put a monetary value on this and it's difficult to measure.  

You should consider:

• the cost of each of your marketing activities, eg public relations, advertising, social media
• the influence of each activity on your customers' attitudes and behaviours
• whether sales cans be directly attributed to particular marketing activities
• the return-on-investment for each marketing activity 

Changes in the market

Consider any changes that may have happened in your industry. Have there been any fundamental changes in innovation, technology or conditions - eg a recession or growth spurt? There may be a change that affects:

• your products or services
• your products' packaging
• the distribution channels you use

You should also look into any new and potential market trends and assess whether these could affect your marketing efforts.