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There is an argument to be made for saying the marketing department is the most important department in a business.
After all, you could have the best product out there, the best price point, with the best team backing you up. But if nobody knows you exist, your excellence is bound to go unnoticed.
But in a post-pandemic world, businesses that are eager to promote their products and services are seeing their marketing expenses climb. With just US digital ad spending alone currently at $239.89 billion and expected to climb to $315.32 billion by 2025, that’s a huge chunk of money.
All of this is leading business owners to ask themselves, “Are my dollars being spent wisely?”
With marketing being such a vital part of running a successful business, you wouldn’t want to cut corners. But with prices soaring, a middle ground has to be found.
So how can you reduce your marketing spend without compromising on quality, and still make sure you’re reaching the right customers at the right time?
We’ve put together five of the best ways to do just that. So that you can continue to promote your business without the headache of an untenable budget.
They say that if you build it, they will come. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case when it comes to getting traffic to your site.
A large part of marketing is about driving high-quality traffic to your website, but paid search traffic is a complex and expensive process that goes away as soon as you stop paying. That’s where organic traffic can come into play.
Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your site from a search engine that hasn’t been paid for.
When doing a Google search, you’ll notice that the first three or four links on a Google search results page will say “Ad” next to them. This shows that they are at the top due to a paid search campaign that has been launched by those businesses with the aim of boosting their search visibility and driving traffic.
Once you scroll down below those options, you’ll come to the organic listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). These are the links to websites that haven’t paid for the privilege of being at the top but have come up "naturally" due to ranking high with Google’s algorithm.
There are a wide variety of ways you can increase your organic traffic. But one of the best ways is to put out high-quality content that resonates with your readers.
Of course, your content should have SEO carefully woven throughout it, but the most important point when it comes to naturally increasing your traffic is to optimize for your audience, not for search engines.
By creating content that provides value for your readers and your ideal buyers, you’ll naturally boost your SEO, therefore increasing your organic traffic. If you prioritize content that caters just to search engines, you’ll just be left with nonsensical content made up of repetitive keywords.
Value-based content can often take the shape of long-form articles intertwined with a couple of important keyword phrases, or building out a series of landing pages with programmatic content.
Paying for a search campaign on Google can get very expensive very quickly, but getting a high ranking organically is far cheaper – and will also provide more value to your reader, and naturally build trust with your audience due to your top-quality content. SEO comes with the added benefit of having the potential to continuously bring in traffic long after it is first published unlike paid ads which go away as soon as spending stops.
It is rarely a positive sign if the word “cannibalization” is involved in a sentence, and this is no different. Cannibalization can be a serious issue in marketing, especially when it comes to your budget.
Paid cannibalization refers to a situation where your paid and organic efforts become competitors with each other. Essentially, two or more of your assets are competing against each other either in your ad sets or for the same keyword on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
If two or more pages on your site are ranked for a particular keyword, it doesn’t mean you’ll be doubly effective. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. This is especially true for organic listings and an unnecessary cost for a mix of paid and organic.
Occasionally, companies will intentionally run ads that overlap with their organic content and usually the intent is to inhibit competitors to run ads in the same space or on branded terms. When this happens it should be a deliberate and strategic business decision since organic traffic will routinely be lost in the process. It is critical for businesses to understand the relationship between the two since organic search and paid advertising teams are often misaligned on business goals.
Google’s algorithm is designed to look out for what’s known as “keyword stuffing.” This is when content spams the same keyword over and over again with the intention of ranking higher in SERP results. Google deems this to be low-quality content, so if it thinks you’re spamming, it will decrease your websites overall ranking.
The second scenario that can happen is Google could end up ranking a page you weren’t looking to promote higher than the one you were looking to promote. For example, if you’re trying to get your homepage to a higher ranking, you could end up promoting your “About Us” page higher.
This means that you’re limiting the extent and effectiveness of paid traffic, while almost certainly increasing the cost of your marketing.
There are a number of different ways you can reduce the likelihood of paid cannibalization. Here are a few of the simple ways:
1. Consolidate your content: If it isn’t strictly necessary to spread out your content over a number of pages, then try merging it into one page that is more likely to rank high for your specific keyword.
2. Re-optimize your pages: Instead of having the same keyword spread across numerous pages, re-optimize each page to correlate to a different specific keyword. This makes sure you are aligning with the precise intent of the searcher per page - therefore helping to boost the SERP results for individual pages whilst still making sure that they don’t overlap.
3. Review your keywords: Google ads allow you to analyze your keywords in search terms reports. This can help you to spot cannibalization and eliminate duplicate uses.
Keywords are absolutely vital in the quest to rank high up on Google SERPs. But with short, generic keywords being fought over and subject to bidding wars, you should look at shifting your focus toward the more specific long-tail keywords.
Keywords aren’t always just a single word. The term “keyword” can also refer to longer, more specific phrases that consumers are more likely to use when they’re searching or when they’re close to a point of purchase.
A small, generalized keyword is commonly known as a “head keyword.” While they can be used to effectively drive traffic, the competition will be fierce – and the price per click will be high.
For example, if you searched “bitcoin”, that would come up with millions of results. But if you narrow your search down to a long-tail keyword such as “pay your bills with bitcoin”, the volume of searches will typically be lower. However, the user qualification and nuance can often lead to better engagement or even conversions.
Long-tail keyword research and optimization allows brands to target untapped space opportunity areas and find new content areas where there may be little to no competition.
Long-tail keywords can be used to narrow down search results and help your business be found.
So for example, if you were marketing your accounting software business and using a head keyword such as “accounting”, then you’ll be competing with a huge number of searches.
However, if your business specialized in large, multi-company accounting software, then you could instead optimize your content to appear if someone searched “accounting software for multiple businesses.”
You will obviously draw less traffic with this long-tail keyword than you would with a shorter, more common one, but the quality of the traffic will be much higher – as the people who search it will be further along the buyer's journey and know exactly what they’re looking for. Hence, long-tail traffic often converts into sales or transactions at a far higher rate than its head-term counterparts.
When using long-tail keywords, you should use your businesses analytics data to guide you. If you see that your content is being found organically through certain phrases, you can use that information to sculpt intelligent, fully optimized long-tail keyword phrases to use in your content.
With long-tail keywords, you can focus your keyword budget on obtaining higher-quality leads and more specific traffic that is more likely to convert.
Landing pages are a key part of the buyer's journey. For new or unknown businesses, they are often the first impression that your audience will have of you. By fully optimizing your landing pages with your pre-existing keywords, you can boost your discoverability as well as your conversion rate.
Most landing pages will be created with the singular goal of getting the reader to the next step of the buyer's journey: conversion.
Landing pages often document details or data that other entities find useful. This is often called "supplemental content" which adds value to the overall proposition.
It’s common knowledge that businesses will want their content to be shared broadly, but the person amplifying a product also needs to get something in return. This tends to take shape in the fact that they want their readership to find value in what they shared. They are also attempting to grow their audience, so it helps if your content clearly stands out from the crowd and provides something unique.
This creates a symbiotic relationship between the business and the sharer - and companies that understand and cultivate this relationship most often end up with the greatest market share.
The cost of buying keywords can vary wildly, with the average cost-per-click price for Google searches ranging from a few cents to $50+ per click – although these high price points are mostly reserved for the highly competitive keywords in major, high-traffic industries and area.
A fully optimized landing page can work wonders for your conversion rate, as well as your budget. This is because they are a relatively inexpensive option, especially if you can build your pages around the keywords that you are already paying for.
By using your existing keywords, you can fully optimize your landing pages to rank better with Google’s algorithm. Meaning you can push traffic to your page with your specific keywords without having to pay a higher price point.
Landing pages also offer convenient topical “content hubs” for consumers to explore more detailed topics within the same general niche. Think in terms of a bicycle wheel where the landing page is the center and the spokes lead out to and from supporting content. These more detailed pages can then operate in reverse, attracting long-tail traffic back to the main landing page through effective, intuitive navigation.
It’s impossible to talk about online marketing without mentioning SEO.
Search engine optimization is the driving force behind ranking high on SERPs. A large portion of your marketing budget can be whittled away by placing paid ads on Google, but if your content is fully maximized with SEO – you can place high on a page for a fraction of the price.
Search engine optimization is the process of ensuring content on a website can be understood by a search engine - which then evaluates both quality and popularity for ranking against consumer keyword searches.
Though it’s important to note that you shouldn’t assume that factors such as good web design and optimization will automatically bring in an audience. A lot of the time consumers will base their buying decisions on which brand they perceive to be better or of a higher quality.
That is why the “word of mouth” factor can be just as important as a quality product and full optimization.
One of the best ways to optimize and maximize your content is to make use of the wide range of SEO tools and services available, such as Quattr. One of the many key advantages of using Quattr is the ability to take the confusion out of SEO by getting actionable insights, and a clear and prioritized list of recommendations that are calculated specifically to increase your rankings.
Quattr even has an AI writer – which can help to give you a outlined structure when you’re writing your copy.
So you can fully maximize the potential of your content to get every ounce of value from each page and piece of content that you put out to the world.
By realigning and optimizing your content, you can make each dollar stretch that much further.
Your marketing budget should always be focused on making the most of everything you already have. As we highlighted in each point, every business can make small changes that can make a big difference.
By staying away from frivolous, unnecessary spending and instead focusing on fully optimizing your existing content, you can push your budget further – while still seeing positive results.
Find out how Quattr can help you to optimize your content and manage your marketing budget with effective, natural, and data-driven optimization.
