It’s that time of year once again. You’re in the midst of preparing your 2017 budget while trying to figure out how to make the most of what’s left in your 2016 marketing budget. While a new cappuccino machine may sound nice (and frothy), it’s not going to give you the biggest bang for your marketing buck. Make the greatest impact, based the size of spend left in your 2016 budget, with these strategic ideas.
$20-80K: HubSpot Website Redesign
Depending on the size and complexity of your website, a budget of $20K to $80K will allow for a complete HubSpot website redesign. Redesigning your website ensures it’s kept fresh, relevant and on track for meeting your marketing, sales and business goals.
Redesign Option 1: Complete Overhaul
If you’re considering a complete redesign, you should also consider a number of steps that help you prepare for choosing an ideal design and development partner.
- Build your team: Your website redesign dream team needs to include a variety of key players within your company with roles and responsibilities you specifically designate.
- Establish your goals: Get your dream team involved in creating goals for your new site, which are likely to include features that make their lives easier and processes that increase visitors and revenue.
- Get specifications: Making your team’s desired features a reality is the job of your design and development partner, and you can make both your jobs easier if you ask yourself the following questions:
- How is this specific feature usually delivered on a website?
- Is there a compelling reason to create a unique experience for this feature?
- How do I want a specific feature to work, what are the mandatory elements required?
- Get proposals: Proposals for your website redesign may contain various project plans, but all should include regular meetings, a discovery phase where you can provide input, design and development, page-level SEO research and implementation, and launch support.
Redesign Option 2: GDD
Another option for website redesign is going with a growth-driven design approach. Growth-driven design, or GDD, involves making constant improvements to your site over time, with a focus on areas that produce more visits, leads and customers. Your ever-evolving website will be kept fresh and current, optimized for lead generation, and relevant to visitors and customers.
GDD can involve changes like a new homepage banner, moving call to action buttons, menus or other content, regularly adding or editing content using personalization tactics – and then running tests to determine the impact of the changes. GDD lets you save the money, time and headaches that come with a complete overhaul while staying ahead of your competitors by constantly optimizing your site.
$5-20K: Paid Media
If you’re looking for a quick lift in visitors and leads, paid media is the way to go. While inbound marketing does work, it takes time for the results to kick in. Paid media can give you a quick infusion of activity while you’re waiting.
Paid media can be especially handy for promoting savings, alerting your audience of new content and encouraging specific action. Sending out emails to support your paid media efforts can strengthen your campaign even further.
Using the end-of-year budget for paid media can be particularly successful as the season gives you plenty of holiday marketing options. Seasonal specials or discounts can be in your lineup, as can releasing new or seasonal products.
$3-10K: Advanced Content
Advanced content can e-books, checklists, white papers, guides or any other type of content website visitors can download in exchange for their contact information. It takes more time to create than the basic content that appears on your site and social media accounts, but it’s also a master lead generator. Advanced content that is relevant to your buyer persona gives you a steady supply of contact information from people interested in your products and services.
Not only are warm leads delivered right to your virtual doorstep, but advanced content additionally helps build relationships and trust while expanding your reach and establishing your brand as a knowledgeable player in your field.
$2-5K: A/B Website Testing
Also known as multivariate split testing, A/B website testing helps you better understand your users so you can more effectively provide them with what they want. The objective is to test one version of a specific element against another version to see which draws more favorable attention and attracts more leads. You can A/B test components of your online marketing campaigns, landing pages, contact pages – or any other area of your website you feel needs a bit of attention.
$1-3K: SEO Competitor Analysis
In order to successfully rank for your desired keywords, you need to first identify keywords for which you can realistically rank based on the size of your company and budget. You then want to perform an SEO competitor analysis to see what you’re up against when it comes to your keyword competition.
An SEO competitor analysis begins with identifying your top competitors for your chosen keywords. It then dives deep into company profiles, backlink profiles and topical authority as well as social media and content strategies.
Establishing industry averages comes next, where you can look at keyword performance based on brand, link locations, and type of sites. Once you have all the data in hand, you can move forward creating an SEO strategy poised to deliver your desired results.
Whether your 2016 budget contains $1K or $50K, and regardless of how you choose to allocate funds, any of the above strategies can help achieve your ultimate goal of increasing traffic and leads.
I'd like to talk more about how to spend the rest of 2016 marketing budget.
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