It’s nearing the end of the year, AKA the all-too-familiar time when businesses take a look at their budgets for next year and figure out how to spend them. If you are looking to shake things up with your marketing next year, here are some tips for what to spend – or not spend – your marketing budget dollars on in 2023.

Ramp up your ad budget

These days, you have to pay to play. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t have an ad budget, you are leaving money on the table. It’s the simplest way to grow your online presence and boost your conversions. Digital marketing includes many forms of advertising, such as:

• PPC
• Social media
• Influencer marketing
• Remarketing
• Affiliate Ads
• Video Ads
• ….and lots more

Make sure you’re setting a budget to be able to run ads in as many of these places as possible. They all work together, they will increase your brand awareness and they will give you a pretty awesome ROI (if done right).

Invest in great, beautiful and effective email automation

Facebook is allowing fewer and fewer targeting options these days, in an effort to protect user’s privacy and to – let’s be honest – be a little less creepy and mind-reading. This is thrusting email marketing back into the spotlight as the best, most effective way to target your customers. This means: Allocate some money from your budget into email automation. So, what does automation it mean?

This means, as opposed to monthly newsletters and one-off sales campaigns that you go into your CMS, create and send to your entire list, an email automation campaign can be set up once. It will then automatically send to a particular individual when that person meets a certain trigger, and keep “dripping” them through the sales process. Triggers can be things like opening a link, making a purchase, abandoning their cart and endless other things. Making sure you get this automated for 2023 will save you tons of time and money on the backend and will give you really great results.

Don’t get looped into buying an expensive tool

We hear about it all the time: the one magic marketing tool your business absolutely NEEDS. You get sold a bill of goods by a super friendly sales rep, and now all of a sudden you are stuck paying tens of thousands of dollars in 2019 for a tool that you barely know how to use. Don’t get us wrong – there are tons of tools out there that work really great, and we even use some of them as well. However, if you are going to invest big in a tool, make sure you spend the time to research it really well and compare. This might include hiring a marketing consultant to help you field all the options if you don’t have the time to do it yourself. Another option might be hiring an in-house marketing coordinator to help you organize all your marketing efforts – chances are, they know how to do most of the things that expensive tools can, or know how to work closely with an agency like ours who does.

Invest in making videos

You already know this: videos are everywhere. Short, snackable clips are all over social media, and longer how-tos are all over YouTube. They work absolute wonders for SEO, and can easily go viral to spread brand awareness. If you’re not making videos in 2023, then you are missing out on a very large set of potential customers. But, where do you start? There are tons of companies (like ours!) who can help you make videos and put them out, or you can just simply grab your iPhone and start talking on your Instagram story. Either way, make sure your business has a plan for videos in 2023!