Even in the best of times determining the best place to spend your marketing budget has been a challenge. This week we’ll help you and your team figure out the best places to spend when the goal posts are moving daily. https://Happy Hao Car-1.wistia.com/medias/8j7yrlt7qd

Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car. We hope you are staying safe and healthy.

With business slowing down, you’re probably looking for places to cut your budget. Since marketing costs somewhere between 10%-30% of revenues , and revenues are dropping sharply, you’re looking at marketing.

Slashing your marketing budget is a short term fix that leads to long term damage. While you might want to cut some, your real goal is to maximize what you do spend.

Thanks to the mere-exposure effect, many of your customers are going to shop with you simply because they’re familiar with your name. It’s not flattering, but it’s a fact. Your goal, while responsibly sheltering in place, is to remain in your customers’ consciousness and maintain your existing base.

Social media is free, making it potentially the most cost-effective form of advertising there is. It’s time to up your social media game.

While you can always post photos of your inventory on Instagram or share articles about your OEM on Facebook, don’t be afraid to get creative. The majority of the country is locked inside and looking for something fun to pass the time. Tell your customers what you’re doing. Make fun videos about whatever comes to mind. It doesn’t even have to be about cars.

Your second concern needs to be an accounting of every penny you’re spending on marketing.

Once you know where the money is going, that means you need to test each component. The silver lining is; you have enough time to tinker. Determine which channels are producing a return. Keep those.

The best part is when this is over, you will have a marketing budget that is as lean as you can make it.

The only thing left to determine is what you’re testing. It’s important to remember the primary purpose of your website: capturing leads. I f you want to be technical , we call this “conversion rate optimization.”

This means that your marketing dollar needs to go directly into capturing leads.

To reiterate: Social media is free. Know where your money is being spent. Test everything. Getting leads and driving engagement is your site’s primary purpose.

Keep all that in mind and your site will be in excellent shape.

That’s all the time we have for today’s workshop.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, leave them below and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

We’ll see you next week for another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

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