If you had an unlimited budget, you’d advertise anywhere and everywhere that provided a positive ROI, and you’d also have the coolest job I’ve ever heard of in marketing. But, if you live and work in the real world, you probably have to pick and choose where you’re going to spend your limited dollars. And, sometimes, there is a lot more to consider than new marketers realize.
Take this example. I previously worked for a company that was marketing across a ton of channels – paid search, SEO, display media, affiliate partners, affiliate networks, and more. And, we were masters of ad and site optimization, able to turn many peoples’ least affordable channel, display advertising, into one of the best performing advertising channels in regards to ROI. It made sense to allocate as much of our budget as we could to this channel – or did it?
There are many hidden factors in prioritizing your marketing efforts if you want to maintain a successful long term strategy. You absolutely must take into consideration long term affects of your short term actions.
Take SEO for example. SEO takes time and, if done right, grows exponentially. It would be short-sighted to think of SEO in terms of your immediate results and only invest proportionate to the revenue you’re currently realizing from organic search traffic.
Similarly, you may have to consider the relationships you need to build with your marketing partners. In the case of the company I worked at before, our short term needs demanded that we often pull back on the budgets we had allocated to some marketing partners. But, what we found was that we could not later get the same allocations back from them. We made more money in the short term, but we impacted our ability to scale in the future.
Other things to consider when deciding where to spend your ad dollars: Do you need to test new channels or demographics to see if there’s an opportunity there? Is there additional value beyond immediate ROI in certain channels – for example, does appearing on MSN.com add credibility to your brand that advertising elsewhere does not? What about creating strategic alliances – does spending more with a particular company get you more favorable terms in other areas? Or, does a particular channel take more effort to manage than another? In that case, it’s costing you more in overhead that you might not be factoring into your reports.
Developing a marketing strategy, or business strategy in general, is always about doing the most you can with your available resources. That means considering all of the factors, all of the data, and all of the hidden benefits of the things you engage in. Sometimes, there is more than meets the eye, and it’s the company with the best eye for opportunity that rises to the top.
Let me know your thoughts!
Joey Flores
EVP of Marketing
StartupArmy.com – Bring in the heavy artillery
Connect with Joey Flores on LinkedIn!
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