WITH marketing budgets reduced, staff on furlough or facing redundancy, marketers across both Ireland, in small to large organisations alike, are facing more challenges than ever when it comes to making resources stretch.
Throughout this pandemic, we’ve all done some belt-tightening and the impact of having less resources on marketers is two-fold. On the one hand, this is a notable and widespread customer trend. There is less money for discretionary spending so the competition for every pound is intense.
So here are some top tips on how Irish marketers can take the positives out of using limited resources in times of uncertainty to ensure higher efficiency and less time wasted:
1 Review your spending and messaging - The ability to review spend may well lead to some long-term changes in marketing spend habits. Stopping marketing spend from bigger organisations caused a big dip in the cost of media, giving them access to TV and print advertising that they may not have been able to use. In particular, B2B messaging can be a lot less formal now, so it’s a good time to review your brand guidelines and the content you produce.
2 Evaluate your target audience - Alleviating some of the strain on your marketing budget can be tricky, and one tip in trying to achieve this is by going back to the drawing board and evaluating who you are trying to reach, and allocate your resources towards a smaller, more targeted audience. By doing this it can allow you to spend less money on needing to produce lots of marketing collateral and advertising. If you have the right targeting, your message is more likely to reach people that will respond. Although your audience may now be smaller, at the same time that you are saving money, you may be bringing more in, so it’s a double edge sword.
3 Make the most of free resources - Use free dashboarding tools like Google Data Studio to monitor the huge amounts of data available that can tell you what your target customers are doing differently. In terms of digital marketing, Facebook and other online advertising platforms offer flexible solutions that might work for you, depending on the size of your targeted audience. These platforms frequently offer credits and other discounts to help you expand your messages.
If you’re a CIM member looking to manage yours and that of your client’s budgets in line with cashflow challenges in terms of PR, you can access the JournoLink online PR platform via the MyCIM platform: https://my.cim.co.uk/mycim/resources/journolink/
JournoLink will provide UK CIM members both a 10 per cent discount and a very budget-conscious way to manage PR. As a retention and recruitment tool, it also offers the option for marketing consultants to expand their services to PR management.
As Irish marketers move forward as the economy opens up again and eventually looking to the post-pandemic world, the role of marketing will be further altered. The expectation of doing more with less, could be for the long haul for sometime to come.
Eileen Curry is chair of CIM Ireland
