How to increase and efficiently use paid media budget per campaign

Companies often spend too much of their proportional budget on the creation of high-quality content and therefore often have too few funds for important paid media measures when launching new products.

In addition, the uncertainty about the effectiveness of the paid media budget often results in the tendency to use too little media budget for paid communication. This gives rise to the danger that companies, especially in the current period with few real contacts and a lack of trade fairs, will devote too little attention to establishing new customer relationships, thus losing awareness in the short term and losing revenue in the longer term.

Possible solutions

The solution is to overcome two challenges. First, the budget for the conception and creation of content must be used as efficiently as possible and maximum quality must be achieved with the minimum possible expenditure of resources. Possibilities for this are shown in the following.

On the other hand, the budget thus saved should then be used in communication measures to win new contacts. The challenge for marketing managers at this point is often to get a sufficiently large budget share approved in the budget planning for paid communication and media partnerships already in the annual planning and then to be able to invest in defined projects in the current year.

First, we address the challenge of the cost-intensive creation of cross-platform content. The mostly very heterogeneous target groups in the B2B sector have become very demanding and are being addressed more and more directly and individually. The development of a target-group-specific marketing approach alone requires an applied flexibility of assets and a differentiation of core messages in the creation of content. At the same time, however, the content must be of high quality and, above all, individual and attention-grabbing. Since most companies market themselves as design and innovation leaders, this positioning already brings with it the requirement to develop unique content that is yet unseen in the respective target group. It is therefore important to be innovative with a moderate use of resources.

The following approaches are possible solutions:

• Check in-house design. It may be more cost-effective across all projects to have a communications designer on the team than to buy all services through an agency. In addition, marketing teams also gain additional flexibility and design expertise that can be put to good use in everyday business on many occasions.
• Invitation to tender for defined creative services with a limited number of qualified competitors
• Consolidation of studio time for shoots and video productions
• Design visual components uniformly, differentiate messages only
• Create and maximize variation in visuals so that content modules are perceived differently.
• Check and determine the use of cost-intensive content very carefully in advance (e.g. videos with complex set construction or digital technology)
• With very limited resources: Content recycling. If you already have a large number of high-quality content assets, it may be worthwhile to check whether they can be visually refurbished and modernized with considerably less effort and used for new products and launches.

Another strong option for the efficient use of resources in marketing is the fundamental management decision to introduce fewer small-scale product innovations to the market over the course of the year, and instead to think in terms of larger thematic blocks and to divide products into groups or clusters that can then be launched on the market thematically in a larger context. Often, product management or development and marketing do not pull in the same direction in companies. While product management tries to make the best possible use of existing human resources as uniformly as possible throughout the year and gradually hand over products to marketing for communication, marketing is more interested in accumulating a critical mass of products and topics on specific themes that justify the effort of developing targeted communication and independent assets in the first place.

At this point, corporate management is called upon to recognize this permanent conflict of goals and to ensure the overall corporate effectiveness of human and financial resources through optimal networking with the respective department heads, and certainly also decision-making.

Efficient use of paid media budget

Using paid media budget as efficiently as possible is, of course, always the main goal of any campaign. At the same time, one pursues the opposing goal of optimal market penetration and achieving maximum awareness for new products or services within the shortest possible period of time. Assuming that there is always a certain natural fluctuation in the target groups addressed and that known partners are also each at different stages of project processing, it is absolutely essential to place product innovations and/or brand awareness in the media and platforms of the main target groups to be defined in order to keep informing new customers and partners about the brand and the product and to inspire them with high-quality content.

As digital information gathering continues to advance and online media providers and publication portals continue to proliferate, innovative brands must deliver attractive and enriching content on the relevant platforms, because only this will have some impact and lead to proactive actions on the part of target groups. The placement of content on digital platforms has an advantage here over the classic analog media, since all important parameters can be precisely measured here in the sense of performance marketing and key figures can be optimally evaluated.

Using the paid media budget as efficiently as possible is, of course, always the most important thing. Longer-term commitments often pay off in terms of better prices and more attractive media formats, and are therefore definitely worth striving for. However, it can also pay to be a partner in new platforms at an early stage if good potential for future growth and added value from the perspective of the target groups is seen. In this way, you can build strong loyalty with the media partner and benefit from the early entry in the long term as growth progresses.

Since architects and planners, as one of the key target groups for building product manufacturers, are always in one of the project phases inspiration, selection, decision, and specification when working on their projects, any content for each of these phases must also exist visibly, available, complete, and well documented before paid media campaigns are launched. The previously prepared customer journey of the target groups must meet all requirements so that in the end the marketing lead also becomes a sales lead. It is therefore always a matter of weighing up these input parameters, which in the end characterize the optimal campaign mix. 

In another article we have written about the development of corporate websites into function hubs with personalized information provision.