It pays to take a fresh look at your marketing budget

During a marketing review meeting with a client today, we were able to discover, and elminate several thousand pounds of unnecessary marketing spend. The items were mainly direct debits for services originally employed 2 years ago, before we started working with the client on various projects like website development and marketing strategy. Examples included subscriptions for search engine optimisation on a site that no longer existed and registration to trade registers that had resulted in no new business for 2 years investment.

With another client we discovered that their old domain and hosting company had continued to charge them for hosting services on a site despite no website being live on that old domain for over 2.5 years.

Taking the time out to take a fresh look at what you are spending across your business makes particular sense at the moment as we all work our way out of the recession that has held us in its grip for the past 18 months. It also makes sense to set up specific cost centres in your accounting package so you can break your marketing budget down to show more refined details, such as advertising, website, email marketing, etc.  This makes analysis later down the line more accurate and less burdensome, so you can keep refining your marketing planning going forward.