Producing quality marketing materials while sticking to your marketing budget can be a challenge, especially when you’re expected to deliver impactful campaigns that hit your business objectives. You’ll be pleased to hear, however, that there are several marketing tactics you can implement that can reduce spend, without compromising on the impact and quality of your marketing efforts.
Below, we’ll uncover several innovative ways to reduce costs in marketing production, for you to optimize resources and help your business achieve more for less.
Best Ways to Reduce Costs in Marketing Production
Reducing costs in marketing production can feel challenging, especially if you’re under pressure from other areas of the business or feel that your in-house team could benefit from additional resources to improve the production process.
If you’re looking to maximize your ROI while producing effective campaigns for your target audience that deliver results, you’re in luck. Here are several key strategies for you to consider to reduce costs in marketing production while ensuring your team still delivers effective marketing activities without affecting the cash flow of the business at all.
Leverage Automation Tools
Looking to optimize your marketing production costs? Leveraging automation tools can be a great way to improve efficiency and streamline your processes, which can save you valuable time and resources.
Automation platforms can take care of those manual, repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting across your social media channels and managing your ad campaigns. Relying on automation tools can give you time back to focus on more strategic or creative activities that require more time and brain power. Using automation platforms can also ensure your marketing messages are delivered consistently and accurately, by reducing the risk of human error.
Another innovative form of automation that could significantly reduce your marketing production costs is AI-powered solutions. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, you can automate several of your day-to-day marketing tasks, for a fraction of the cost. For example, AI can analyze large quantities of customer data and identify trends and patterns, allowing you to deliver personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with your target demographics. Using AI-powered solutions can help you to reduce marketing costs and can save you time and manual effort, without sacrificing quality or efficiency in your marketing operations.
Offshore Non-Core Activities
Outsourcing or offshoring any non-core activities, such as your creative production, can be an effective strategy to cut marketing costs while allowing your team to prioritize tasks that impact your business objectives. Build strong relationships with external providers who can manage the entire process, like We Are Amnet.
We do offshoring a bit differently than others, we call it Smartshoring®. We have account managers in your own country who manage the workflow and ensure that your project always comes in on time and under budget who work alongside our offshore creative production hubs with skilled production specialists. This ensures that cutting costs will never impact the quality of work your in-house marketing agency produces.
Here are just some non-core activities you may choose to outsource to reduce marketing production spend:
- Graphic design: Offshoring graphic design tasks, such as design adaptation & PowerPoint templates, can reduce marketing costs – especially if you use the services on a large scale
- Content creation: Consider offshoring your content creation, such as copywriting, video production and editing. Doing so can help you achieve your marketing goals, without the need to hire full-time staff.
- Transcreation/localization: Need content that sounds perfect around the world? Offshoring this task not only helps you find the perfect local talent around the world, but also manage the entire project seamlessly.
- Web design and development: Instead of hiring a local agency to redevelop your website, use an offshore agency with the same skills and quality finish but at a lower cost.
- Digital Banners: Use an offshore provider to create multiple static and animated versions of your digital banners to save your employees from having to do the laborious task. Better yet, use an offshore provider who also uses AI tools to accelerate this processes even further.
If your in-house team has any skill gaps, offshoring provides a low-cost way of filling these gaps quickly. It ensures that you build relationships with people around the world with strong skills who can create high-quality content and bolster your in-house team.
Optimize Content Repurposing
Another way to reduce the cost of content production is to maximize the content you already have. Doing so can save you the cost of producing new content regularly, by repurposing content.
Implementing a multi-channel distribution approach allows you to repurpose your existing content across various platforms and save time and money while ensuring all material across every platform is kept on message.
For example, a blog post could be repurposed across your social media platforms, as an Instagram reel or social media post. This approach can reduce your marketing production costs, by maximizing the value of each piece of content you produce. Likewise, focusing on producing evergreen content rather than seasonal content can ensure your content remains relevant over time so you can reuse or update it.
Adopt Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
Favoring cost-effective digital marketing strategies can significantly cut marketing costs. Digital content creation, for example, is often cheaper to produce than traditional marketing materials such as direct mail that requires printing and mailing. Creating blog posts, social media content and newsletters will cost your business much less than producing physical content. Should you prioritize digital content, make sure you invest in search engine optimization (SEO) tools to improve your visibility on search engines.
These strategies not only lower marketing spend. They also provide flexibility, scalability and measurability by allowing you to analyze their effectiveness for improved ROI.
Recognise In-House Production Limitations
If you have strong in-house resources available, then use them to the best of their ability, but don’t forget, they can’t do everything. Knowing when to offshore work ensures that your in-house team isn’t struggling with additional workload, isn’t burnt out and can enjoy the creative side of their job.
We’d never recommend replacing your in-house team with outsourced talent. However, building offshoring into your marketing strategy is a great way of helping your team deliver content at scale consistently..
Recognising your team’s limitations ensures you can offshore when you need to and save them from burnout and the company some money!
Utilize Data-Driven Decision Making
Data-driven decision-making can significantly reduce your marketing production costs. Using data to inform your decisions and marketing plans ensures your strategy is customer-focused – you’ll know their interests and preferences so you can optimize your campaigns to appeal to their preferences.
To implement data-driven decision-making, you can use data analytics to track the performance of your campaigns. First, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your campaign so you know what success looks like. For example, you may be aiming for a certain conversion rate or email open rate. Once you’ve defined these objectives, you can collect audience data to know how your customers are responding to your marketing campaigns and where you can cut costs.
Adopt Sustainable Practices
Adopting sustainable practices can have a positive impact on not only your budget but the environment too. Moving towards digital marketing solutions and greener ways of working can reduce the costs associated with print and physical media while minimizing paper usage and carbon emissions.
If print and physical media are crucial to your business, there are ways in which you can still reduce your carbon emissions. Organizations like We Are Ad Green can help you ensure that all of your working practices, including your physical media are as environmentally friendly as possible. With their help, you can increase your energy efficiency and cut down on paper consumption while maintaining high-quality standards for physical and digital assets.
Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
Leveraging user-generated content can be an effective way to reduce marketing costs while improving the authenticity and engagement of your brand.
User-generated content, from customer testimonials to photos and videos shared by customers on social media, can reduce the need for expensive professional content. With UGC, you gain a steady stream of new content that is genuine and more trustworthy – removing any bias associated with the marketing campaigns you produce. This authenticity can help you to build customer relationships and loyalty, without increased marketing spend. UGC also encourages a sense of community amongst your customers. Customers who share the benefits of your brand and products are likely to become brand advocates – reducing the need for regular, paid advertising.
Takeaways
Achieve unparalleled results and maximize your brand visibility while sticking to your marketing strategy and budget. With high-quality content and great communication with our expert offshore studios and in-country account managers, there’s never been a better time to offshore your content production and there’s no better value for your money than Smartshoring®!
Stay ahead of the curve with We Are Amnet. Get in touch today to get started.
