5 Tips for Food Marketers on Maximizing Their Marketing Dollars

BLOG June 30 2021

According to Rakuten Marketing, marketers will waste 26% of their marketing budget in 2018 on the wrong channels or strategies. While marketing will always involve a certain amount of trial and error, minimizing the error can help you maximize the remaining marketing dollars at your disposal. There is no better time than the present to identify the sneaky habits and tactics that could be draining your marketing dollars without you even knowing about it. Here are 5 tips to help you get more from your money.

Create a Plan

As a seasoned marketer, we’re sure you’re well aware of the importance of planning! However, it’s amazing how often the rush to execute leads to poor planning. The first crucial piece related to maximizing marketing dollars centres around developing a plan. By having an overall strategy tied to your marketing activities, you’ll know what your results mean when you go to measure how well each marketing activity is performing.

Not sure what metrics you should be measuring on social media? Find out now!

Pay for Deliverables, Not Time

Did you ever get the invoice for a job you thought was going to be quick and easy and wonder “Is that decimal in the right place?!” Maximizing marketing dollars becomes so much easier when tying payment for your marketing work to clearly outlined deliverables. You and the service delivery provider can devise clear deliverables and then decide a flat fee around these deliverables, or even on a per-deliverable basis. The point is that you know that the work you need to get done is being completed, without fretting about hemorrhaging money with little to show.

Map Out Content

With the consumer in power, marketing doesn’t work without a target.  You need to align your content to the buyer’s journey. Creating personas for each type of consumer and segmenting accordingly will assist you in understanding your target and will steer you in the right direction when deciding what content to create. You can hit the bullseye with a content map and identify areas that need further support. The content map also allows you to identify the lowest hanging fruit or where there are clear gaps in your content strategy. As a result, maximizing marketing dollars in areas that need it becomes much easier.

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Own Your Content

The issue with a lot of standard marketing agency models is that the content created is not owned by the client. This means they do not own the rights to the content and can’t control those rights which, bottom line, means they really don’t own the content either.  If a brand creates this content in this way they may become obligated to subscribe to high monthly fees just to keep their content. So, it’s important to ensure that you own your content.

Review & Identify Waste

Marketing is constantly changing and evolving. So, it’s important to continuously review how things are done and how things can be done better, smarter and faster. Consider scheduling a periodic efficiency audit or assigning a team member the task of identifying and reducing waste on an ongoing basis. Look for concrete results and empower this individual to review and vet each new opportunity to curb waste and bring only the best options to you for final approval.

Are your recipes not driving conversions? Check out why you should do a recipe database audit and make your budget work harder for you!

Conclusion

The key to maximizing marketing dollars is to clamp down on areas of silent waste. It may take some time to master, but having the tools, insights, and knowledge to know what saves you money and what doesn’t will serve you well in the long run. Plus, as brands become aware of wastage, further opportunities present themselves – so keep going, stay flexible, and keep an eye on unnecessary line items.