Making the Most of a Limited Ad Budget

Your advertising goals must always be defined within the limits of your advertising budget. We can all dream about what we’d do with unlimited ad spend, but the reality is that every business must manage its ad budgets wisely and build a strategy to maximize their ROI potential.

Local businesses are particularly aware of the financial realities of their ad budgets. No matter how valuable localized advertising can be for your brand, small businesses only have so much money they can put toward their ad campaigns.

And while budget constraints are a fact of life for many businesses, difficult economic circumstances and internal cost-cutting moves can further limit the amount of money available to your advertising strategy.

But it’s not only about how much advertising money you have to spend. How you spend it matters, too. At Cox Media, we know a thing or two about delivering advertising ROI even when working with a limited budget. Here are some of our top tips to help your business maximize the value of your ad campaigns.

Repurpose Content to Lower Production Costs

Advertising budgets are split across two broad categories: advertisement production and ad placement. Production costs can vary widely depending on the type of campaign you’re creating, and if you’re going to invest in quality creative (as you should), it’s helpful to be able to repurpose that content on multiple platforms.

Existing audio and video content can be repurposed and re-edited to create new digital audio, video and social media ads, while display ads and other visual assets can be incorporated into new display ads.

Similarly, high-performing social media content can be repurposed to leverage existing content that has a proven track record of ROI. Audit your existing content to identify any content that could be used for this purpose.

Dig Deeper Into Ad Inventories to Unearth Value

Certain ad channels reward advertisers that put in extra work to identify ad spots that offer great relevance and value for your brand.

Paid search campaigns are a great example of this approach: by building campaigns that utilize long-tail keyword targeting and filter audiences by location, your business can focus its ad spending on only the most relevant ad inventories. And, because your targeting is so specific, you’re also likely to experience less competition for those keywords, which will further lower the potential bid cost.

Similar tactics can be deployed across social media, display advertising, digital video and digital audio campaigns. One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing optimization is the ability to drill down and discover these “bargains,” lowering your campaign costs even as you improve the audience targeting for your ads.

Leverage Ad Targeting Capabilities to Eliminate Wasted Spend

Long-tail keywords and location-based targeting aren’t the only ways to narrow the focus of your campaigns. Small changes to how you filter audiences and deliver ads can further trim the fat from your ad budget.

One of the easiest ways to tighten the belt on your ad spending is to implement refinements that prioritize only your highest-value prospects. If your business has created multiple buyer personas to be targeted in your advertising, you could limit your campaign targeting to only the persona that represents your core audience.

Geotargeted ad delivery can be designed in several different ways. Addressable TV advertising and geofenced ad delivery are two powerful ways location is utilized to control ad spending and improve ROI potential. The time of day can also be controlled when setting ad delivery rules: your business could decide, for example, to set ad campaigns to run only within your business hours of operation.

Shift Ad Spending Toward High-Performance Campaigns

If your business is already running more than one campaign across multiple ad channels, one simple strategy for boosting ROI is to evaluate campaign performance and reallocate spending to increase funding for high-performance campaigns and channels.

While there’s always value in maintaining a multi-channel digital ad strategy—particularly because of the way these different channels can work together to improve overall results—some small changes to your spending mix can push your overall ad ROI higher.

Prioritize Analytics and Ad Campaign Optimization

No matter how big or small your advertising budget is, analytics can help you push your ad performance and value creation higher.

The harder you work to uncover insights about campaign performance, the more effectively you’ll be able to steer those campaigns toward better results. Many digital advertising platforms offer built-in, self-service analytics tools to make this process easier for small businesses—and a digital advertising partner can help you better understand performance metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Struggling to deliver results with a limited advertising budget? An experienced marketing strategy consultant can help you implement cost-effective advertising methods to elevate campaign performance and ROI—even within your current spending constraints.

Contact us today to find out how we can help.