Picture this. The quarter close is just weeks away. You open up your budget tracker to reveal tens of thousands of unspent dollars. You have a marketing budget that will go to waste — and not get allocated to your department next year — if you don’t act fast. And there’s just not enough time to kick off or produce anything net-new.
If this sounds like you at this very moment, you’re not alone. Most digital marketers find themselves in this situation at least once a year. And with marketing budgets at historical lows — down a whopping 41% from last year — that money is more precious than ever before. You’ve got to find some quick, creative, and (most importantly) strategic ways to spend those use-it-or-lose-it dollars. We’ve got you covered. Here are five fast, smart ways to spend your remaining marketing budget.
The fastest way to allocate a leftover marketing budget is to put it behind a campaign that is already live. There’s very little in the way of putting that money to work because the up-front creative production is already done. Speak with your media team or agency to understand what’s working best so far. Perhaps a certain ad network or syndication partnership is working like gangbusters. Or maybe you have one or two variations of your ad creative that are outperforming all the rest. Those are the kinds of opportunities where some extra budget can go a long way.
Repurposing is one of the most efficient ways to build an army of content for your brand. And one of the most cost-effective ways to repurpose is by transforming the audio and video content you’ve already created into text-based content. Blog posts are typically the easiest to execute — simply because they reside on an owned channel. And in a use-it-or-lose-it budget situation, the easier to execute, the better.
Simply gather up your best-performing webinar, virtual event, and podcast content, transcribe them, and hand everything off to a trusted freelancer or editorial vendor. What you should expect in return are long-form, text-based reframings of the repurposed content — that can now give your website a nice SEO boost. Bonus: certain audio and video assets are so rich in insights and material, they can actually result in multiple blog posts.
Another easy place to put your remaining budget to work is in social media. First, you’ll want to gather some data around your top-performing posts. Which drove the highest engagement? Which drove conversions? Which grew your organic following? Giving them a boost could help you start the next quarter with a larger, more engaged group of followers and fans.
There’s no better time to try a new channel or social platform than when you have funds that really need to be spent. It will allow you to use up some budget and provide valuable learnings on how your brand performs in a new space.
Starting with an ad you already know is working for you elsewhere is key. Been wanting to jump into TikTok? Grab your best-performing Instagram story ad and give it a whirl.
There’s a more modern way to test ad creative and it’s blowing A/B testing out of the water. It’s called multivariate testing, and it not only helps you understand which ads are winners but also which modular creative elements — headlines, images, calls to action — cause your audience to click. With the reliability of audience targeting taking a nosedive since the introduction of iOS 14 privacy regulations, innovative marketers are using multivariate testing to take a creative-first approach to advertising. Adding this kind of tool to your martech stack is a super-strategic way to spend your remaining budget, one that will pay dividends well into the next year.
Marpipe is the only multivariate ad testing platform that lets you build ad variations and launch tests — in front of your actual target audience — automatically. To help you spend that remaining budget wisely, we’re offering use-it-or-lose-it pricing if you schedule a 1:1 product tour to take place before December 17, 2021.
Your marketing budget is a living, breathing business organism. Some quarters, there’s just not enough, and in others, you’re frantically searching for smart, creative ways to spend it all. Having a handful of low-production, high-impact ideas like these in your back pocket comes in handy whenever the quarter-end rolls around and you have some extra dough to play with.
