I swear I was just buying Christmas presents a few days ago, and now it’s mid-July. Where did 2021 go? Shockingly, we must acknowledge we’re past the midpoint of this year, and that means many companies are approaching the end of their fiscal year.
It’s not uncommon for companies to have a little money left to spend at this point of the year. If you happen to find yourself in this situation, I have a few ideas for marketing tactics you can spend your money on now that will help your company immensely heading into your next fiscal year.
1. Spend Some Dollars on Digital
From building brand awareness to generating leads for your sales team, there is a lot you can accomplish through digital marketing, and it’s always a smart choice to spend money in this arena.
There are a million different digital marketing options and tactics you can try, from influencer campaigns to YouTube ads. But if you want to get good ROI without breaking the bank, I recommend starting with these two tactics:
- Lead generation campaigns on Facebook: Generating leads is one of the most important things you can do to boost awareness of your brand, increase sales and keep your prospect pipeline full. There are several important advantages to running a lead generation campaign through Facebook: It’s affordable, you can use forms that are pre-populated and the data you collect will sync directly with your CRM, to name a few.
- Search campaigns on Google: Google is the tried-and-true standard of online advertising for a reason. It’s estimated Google processes 63,000 search queries every second, 5.6 billion searches per day and about 2 trillion global searches per year. Google ads provide a cost-effective way to target specific users and show your ads to people who are looking for the kind of products, solutions and service your business offers.
2. Make Sure You’re Content with Your Content
Since we’re talking about digital marketing, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address content marketing and how important it is to your overall marketing strategy. From your favorite podcasts to the blog post you’re reading right now, every piece of content you consume online has multiple purposes, the most important of which is getting you to engage with the owner of the content.
This is a good time of the year to take stock and ask yourself some important content marketing questions. I’ll give you a few to get started:
- Which content is performing well enough to deserve more promotion?
- Which content needs to be reviewed, refreshed, revised or rejected completely?
- Which areas of my website could use some love?
- How can I improve SEO?
The answers to these questions should generate plenty of areas in which you can spend some time and fiscal resources to bolster your content marketing strategy and give you a good starting point heading into your new fiscal year.
3. Back Your Stack
I don’t have to tell you that technology is always improving, and that certainly includes marketing technology (MarTech). Your MarTech stack is a huge driver of your ability to grow and attract new customers while keeping current customers happy.
That’s why you should take frequent audits of your stack to make sure you have the proper tools you need to drive your marketing strategy. Think about your current pain points and how you can bolster your stack to address them. After all, it’s estimated there are around 8,000 marketing tools to choose from.
- If your reporting is taking too long or relies on processes that are mostly manual, you may want to invest in something like TapClicks or Whatagraph.
- Looking for a way to streamline your email marketing? Maybe it’s time to explore Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor.
- If you’re having a hard time balancing different tasks across multiple clients, you’re probably overdue for a project management tool like Trello or ProWorkflow.
If you’re looking for even more ideas to finish your fiscal year strong, or if your business could use some help heading into your next fiscal year, we’d love to help.
Kedran Whitten, Brand825’s co-founder, has more than 28 years of marketing leadership experience at the SVP and CMO levels, including revenue growth, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, etc. When she’s not helping brands be their best, Kedran can be found jumping out of planes, at Tennessee Titans games and spending time on the lake.
