https://chameleoncollective.com/skill/fractional-cmo-chief-marketing-officer/


https://chameleoncollective.com/skill/fractional-cmo-chief-marketing-officer/

The Best Ways to Eliminate Waste in Marketing
If you want to be effective in your approach to marketing, you need to ensure your
marketing department works efficiently. That means being able to readily identify
and cut points of waste within the department.
What are the best strategies for identifying and eliminating this waste?
Types of Marketing Waste
First, understand that there are multiple types of marketing waste, some of which
are easier to identify than others.
· Wasted money. Wasted money is typically the easiest form of marketing
waste to spot. If you spend money on a strategy, and it doesn't show results in
excess of what you spent, the money is ostensibly wasted. Note that some of this
waste stems from the reality that if you allocated this money differently, it would
have yielded better results. Accordingly, you can argue it's a waste of money to
spend on any suboptimal strategy.
· Wasted time. Wasted time is a bit harder to identify, especially if you aren't in
the habit of tracking your employees’ efforts with granularity. It's important that
everyone in your organization uses their time wisely, or you'll leave potential
results on the table.
· Wasted opportunities. Wasted opportunities are even harder to identify, in
part because the most severe wasted opportunities are ones you didn't even know
existed. You might see impressive results with your primary marketing channel,
never knowing there's an even better channel out there waiting to be discovered.
Identifying Marketing Waste
So what strategies can you use to identify all forms of marketing waste, including
more challenging areas like wasted opportunities?
· Hire an outside expert. One of your best options is to hire an outside expert
who can unbiasedly evaluate your efforts and help you come up with ideas to cut
waste. For example, you can hire a fractional CMO. Your fractional CMO will likely
work alongside your traditional CMO and
the rest of your marketing team to identify
areas for potential improvement. Given their
knowledge and experience, they can
usually guide you to budget refinements
that ultimately lead to better results.
· Measure and analyze everything.
Waste is objective, so you need objective
measurements to make rational decisions
around it. If you aren't already doing so,
make an effort to measure and analyze data
related to all your marketing efforts.
· Get feedback. It's also a good idea to get feedback from your marketing team
members, especially if they have specialized areas of expertise. Even your most
junior employees may have ideas and insights that illuminate areas of waste or
uncover new opportunities for you to explore. Make sure you reward people who
bring forward good ideas so they're more likely to bring similarly powerful ideas in
the future.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/053015/how-calculate-roi-marketing-campaign.asp


https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/053015/how-calculate-roi-marketing-campaign.asp


https://hbr.org/sponsored/2023/04/how-automation-drives-business-growth-and-efficiency


https://hbr.org/sponsored/2023/04/how-automation-drives-business-growth-and-efficiency

· Prioritize ROI. Return on investment (ROI) should be your top priority when
evaluating expenditures and results. It's the ultimate
metric for determining whether your money was well
spent. It's also very convenient for comparing different
strategies and approaches, apples to apples.
· Compare internally and externally. Speaking of
comparisons, make sure you compare your marketing
results both internally and externally. Internally, you can compare different
strategies and tactics against each other to determine which are the best.
Externally, you can compare your results to industry benchmarks and see how
well you're faring overall.
· Run experiments and hypotheticals. Experiments are perhaps your best tool
for evaluating the performance of various approaches. Be sure to run them
regularly to get an objective grasp on the situation.
Eliminating Marketing Waste
Once you've identified marketing waste, you can begin cutting it.
· Cancel, cut, and fire. Some cuts are easier to make than others. Depending
on what you find, you may want to cancel subscriptions, make budget cuts in
various areas, and even let some people go. It all depends on your circumstances.
· Reallocate funds. You can also reallocate funds from one strategy to another
or one channel to another. This is especially important if you find that one strategy
or tactic has disproportionate value to your organization.
· Optimize your efforts. Focus on efficiency in everything your marketing
department does. Can you milk more value out of your marketing content? Can
you optimize workflows to expedite delivery? Can you shuffle your team so they
spend fewer hours on core responsibilities?
· Use automation. You likely already realize the power of automation in
marketing – but you may not be using it to its fullest effect. Integrate it where you
can to save time and money.
· Keep experimenting. Never stop experimenting if you want to continue
learning and improving.
It's practically impossible to eliminate all forms of waste in your marketing
department, but it's still important to strive for that ideal. The more efficient and
focused your marketing efforts are, the more your company will be rewarded.