Marketing budgets are popular targets for cost-cutting. In fact, they’re often the first to get a taste of the scissors when cash flows slow down. And even though marketers know that this is wrong, it still happens. So what can you do to maintain or even increase performance with limited resources? One powerful solution is applying the Pareto Principle.
The Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In terms of marketing, this means three things:
1. 20% of your efforts is likely responsible for 80% of your results
2. You can greatly improve the efficiency of your budget by figuring out which 20% is giving you the best return on investment.
3. You can drive up your marketing performance by cutting spending from poorly performing parts of your integrated strategy, and boosting resources for the high-performing parts.
For example, your analytics data shows that your cost-per-click campaign isn’t driving many high quality leads to your landing pages, but your educational blogs are. In this case, it’s likely a good idea to reallocate some of your paid advertising budget towards creating more high quality content that your target audience really engages with.
In fact, the above example is a rather common situation. HubSpot, the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform, surveyed over 4000 marketing professionals, and found that across the globe, traditional paid advertising is the deemed the most overrated tactic. As inbound marketers love data-driven decision making, the above results aren’t just opinion, but rather based on hard numbers.
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