7 Ways To Wisely Spend Your Extra End-Of-Year Marketing Budget

With just a few months before 2021 comes to an end, a lot of marketers will have a pleasant surprise that comes in the form of an extra marketing budget. All those advertisements, promotions, and events that you did not get to spend on for whatever reason helped you, albeit unknowingly, save a substantial amount from your marketing budget.

When you’re scrambling to spend that money but without a concrete plan, you could be making poor spending decisions that could waste all that money on unnecessary things. This is why it’s important you make the most strategic choices to ensure that you’ll be putting all that extra money to good use and give your 2022 search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing goals a boost.

Spending your extra end-of-year marketing budget smartly

Unfortunately, your surplus marketing budget can’t be spent on personal expenditures. Fortunately, here’s a list of some genius ways to spend whatever’s left of your marketing budget.

1. Useful tools to make your marketing team’s life easier

With the extra marketing money you have, now is a great time to test out some new tools and services to upgrade what you currently have and make your team’s life easier. There’s a ton of useful apps out there, including software upgrades, marketing automation, social listening tools, and the like.

For content strategy, some of the best tools you can invest in include Kissmetrics, Smaply, Foresee, Sprout Social, Dyno Mapper, HypeAuditor, and Tout. For content marketing, you can use DivvyHQ, Trello or Asana, Mailchimp, Pardot, HubSpot, and SEMrush. Copyscape, Grammarly, and Adobe Spark are for content creation.

2. Holiday-inspired content

The holidays are just around the corner, which means that all marketing messages will revolve around the upcoming festivities, especially Christmas and New Year.

One way to wisely spend your marketing budget is through relevant content to help tide you over during the busiest time of the year. You can create content about end-of-year roundups or predictions for next year are especially popular during this time. However, to make your content relevant, you need to make sure that you publish at least two to three weeks ahead of the holidays so you can have enough time to promote your published articles and allow readers to share your content.

3. Engaging interactive campaign

Experts are saying that if you aren’t interacting with your audience online, you’re not engaging or connecting with them the right way. You’re missing out on a lot of opportunities to interact and connect with your followers, which can help bring more traffic to your social platforms and your site.

What makes social media different from other marketing channels is that people tend to skip content that only preaches about a brand and hardly makes an effort in reaching out to them. In other words, one-sided advertisements tend to be overlooked and get lost in a sea of content.

Besides engaging a digital marketing agency, to boost your social media presence, you need to create an interactive campaign that will invite your audience to engage with you. There are many benefits to interactive content. It is more shareable, has more relevant metrics, can increase engagement rates, and will improve user experience.

One way to interact with your audience is by creating and optimizing infographics that will stop users from scrolling and encourage them to respond. This can be done You can also create engaging and thought-provoking videos, which are the most in-demand content on social media nowadays. Aside from that, you can conduct polls, surveys, and contests that will entice people into participating.

4. Next year’s content strategy

Before you know it, 2021 will be over and you’ll have little to no time to reassess your goals and strategy. This is why it is encouraged that you jumpstart your content strategy for next year starting now while you still have time. You need to determine what to focus on. Would it be social media strategy, lead generation, engaging more customers, or all of the above? Your decision should be based on the insights you’ve gained this year.

By putting time and effort into creating a solid content strategy for next year, you’ll be able to make better decisions, ensure that everyone in your team is on the same page, and improve your resource and budget allocation.

When planning your content strategy, you need to make sure that it is consistent, comprehensive, flexible, and is aligned with your goals.

5. Online courses

Allocating a portion of your marketing budget to further your employees’ know-how on anything related to your business will result in new business wins. Your team will be able to be more participative in brainstorming sessions and be more confident in sharing their ideas to improve your strategies.

You can find excellent digital marketing courses around the web, including those from LinkedIn Learning, Hubspot Academy, and Coursera. Look for online courses that a majority of your team members would like to learn to hone their skills and boost their confidence.

6. Content distribution

What’s so Important about having great content is that it can be used long after it was published. Evergreen content can keep driving leads, impressions, and traffic for months or even years. And to make the most of such content, you need to find ways to boost existing content and amplify what’s left of your marketing budget.

You should also look into the channels you use for content distribution to ensure that you will reach the right people. When choosing your distribution channels though, you need to take a strategic approach to know exactly which ones will work for you and get the results you want.

To choose the right distribution channels, you need to know your goals, audience, and channels. To know the best channels for your business, you need to focus on your goals first. Do you want to drive more web traffic, get more followers, or boost engagement? Know more about who your audience is, what they need, and how you can serve them better to better connect with them. Keep in mind that you should focus all your marketing strategies on your audience because, after all, everything your business does is for them – the end-users.

7. A creative agency

Oftentimes, it’s best to seek professional help, especially when it comes to something as complex as social media marketing or search engine optimization. If you want to get the most mileage out of the extra marketing budget you have, a creative agency can definitely help you achieve your goals. After all, they have more ideas, knowledge, and experience than you have.

Find the right digital marketing agency that will take time to understand your goals, needs, and circumstances. One that has years of experience and a roster of loyal clients is sure to be the best agency to partner with.

Kicking off the new year with a strong foundation

Your surplus budget can open up new opportunities for you to make the new year your most successful year yet in terms of marketing strategy. Be sure to carefully weigh all your options to make the most of your extra marketing budget.