Tips on how to stretch your marketing budget

Most small businesses have modest marketing budgets, which means you have to make every dollar count.

Here are five ways to get big results from a small budget:

First, use your ads for more than just space advertising. Ads are expensive to produce and expensive to run.

But there are ways to get your advertising message in your prospect’s hands at a fraction of the cost of space advertising.

The least expensive is to order an ample supply of reprints and distribute them to customers and prospects every chance you get.

When you send literature in response to an inquiry, include a copy of the ad in the package.

This reminds a prospect of the reason he responded in the first place and reinforces the original message.

Distribute ads internally to other departments—engineering, production, sales, customer service and R&D—to keep them up to date on your latest marketing and promotional efforts.

Make sure your salespeople receive an extra supply of reprints and are encouraged to include a reprint when they write to or visit their customers.

Turn the ad into a product data sheet by adding technical specifications and additional product information to the back of the ad reprint.

This eliminates the expense of creating a new layout from scratch.

And it makes good advertising sense, because the reader gets double exposure to your advertising message.

Ad reprints can be used as inexpensive direct mail pieces.

You can mail the reprints along with a reply card and a sales letter.

Unlike the ad, which is “cast in concrete,” the letter is easily and inexpensively tailored to specific markets and customer groups.

If you’ve created a series of ads on the same product or product line, publish bound reprints of the ads as a product brochure.

This tactic increases prospect exposure to the series and is less expensive than producing a brand new brochure.

If your ads provide valuable information of a general nature, you can offer reprints as free educational material to companies in your industry.

Or, if the ad presents a striking visual, you can offer reprints suitable for framing.

Use your ads again and again. You will save money—and increase frequency—in the process.

Second, if something works, stick with it.

Too many marketers scrap their old promotions and create new ones because they’re bored with their current campaign. That’s a waste.

You shouldn’t create new ads or promotions if your existing ones are still accurate and effective.

You should run your ads for as long as your customers read and react to them. Third, don’t over present yourself.

A strange thing happens to some entrepreneurs when they get a little extra money in the ad budget: they see fancy four-colour brochures, gold embossed mailers and fat annual reports produced by Fortune 500 firms.

Then they say, “This stuff sure looks great—why don’t we do some brochures like this?” That’s a mistake.

The look, tone and image of your promotions should be dictated by your product and your market—not by what other companies in other businesses put out.

Producing literature that’s too fancy for its purpose and its audience is a waste of money.

And it can even hurt sales—your prospects will look at your overdone literature and wonder whether you really understand your market and its needs.

Fourth, use “modular” product literature.

One common advertising problem is how to promote a single product to many small, diverse markets.

Each market has different needs and will buy the product for different reasons.

But on your budget, you can’t afford to create a separate brochure for each of these tiny market segments.

Fifth, use article reprints as supplementary sales literature.

Marketing managers are constantly bombarded by requests for “incidental” pieces of product literature.

Engineers want data sheets explaining some minor technical feature in great detail.

Sixth, explore inexpensive alternatives for lead generation, such as banner advertising, organic search and PR.

Many smaller firms judge marketing effectiveness solely by the number of leads generated.

They are not concerned with building image or recognition; they simply count bingo-card inquiries.

Seventh, do not overpay for outside creative talent. Hire freelancers and consultants whose credentials—and fees—fit the job and the budget.

Eight, do it yourself. Tasks such as distributing press releases or creating simple squeeze pages can usually be done cheaper in-house than outside. Save the expensive agency or consultant for tasks that really require their expertise.

Nine. Get maximum mileage out of existing content (text and images).

Photos, illustrations, layouts and even copy created for one promotion can often be lifted and reused in other pieces to significantly reduce creative costs.

For example, copy created for a corporate image ad can be used as the introduction to the annual report.

Also, you can save rough layouts, thumbnail sketches, headlines and concepts rejected for one project and use them in future ads, mailings and promotions.

Bly is a marketing consultant.