What You Should Do BEFORE Cutting Your Marketing Budget

For many people, businesses, and academic institutions, the past few months have been a period of careful budgeting and unease about the near furture. But instead of operating from a scarcity mindset, we recommend shifting to an opportunity mindset. As an academic institution, it’s important to always carefully manage your budget, so at times like these, it’s even more important to look at what needs to be preserved and what might need to be cut… but also what unique opportunities the situation might present.

You may be asking: “Should I cut my marketing budget?” While this may seem effective in the short term, its long-term consequences could have a severe impact on your institution’s enrollment rates. To prevent this, it’s best to exhaust all other avenues before eliminating your higher ed marketing budget. Here are a few key steps you should take beforehand.

Perform an Audit

First and foremost, it’s important to determine where all of your enrollment marketing budget is going. 

• What active marketing campaigns do you have running? 
• How much do they cost? 
• What’s the return on investment for each of them? 

Get a solid dataset to work with and you’ll have a much better idea of gaps in your budget, instances of overspending, and other issues. Once you’ve identified the issues via an audit, it’s much easier to address them.

Don’t Overlook Your Content

In addition, it’s also worth auditing the contents of each of your marketing campaigns. This isn’t an audit in the financial sense; it’s more to determine whether or not a marketing campaign is doing its job. Similar to a program page, each ad campaign you put out should clearly state the name of your organization, the specific program or degree you’re advertising, the traits that set your institution apart from the competition, and a clear call to action. If any of your ad campaigns lack these elements, you’ll likely notice a sub-optimal ROI. 

Similarly, your organic social content and email marketing campaigns should be reviewed the same clarity of message. Before cutting the wrong thing and making your overall problem even worse, you should first identify each of these issues, resolve them, and you’ll start seeing results!

Add a Dash of Clarity to Improve Campaign Effectiveness

To help you resolve the issues you identified above, we recommend using a proven advertising framework, like the Storybrand framework. This framework is designed to provide you with a simple and achievable structure to follow to help you strengthen your marketing message, focus on your ideal audience, optimize your efforts, and turn a slow trickle of viewers into a steady stream of enrollments. 

The Storybrand framework’s effectiveness stems from the fact that it creates a narrative for each viewer in which they are the protagonist of their story and you are their wise mentor, similar to the classic hero’s journey. As their guide, you will provide them with valuable insights that allow them to avoid pitfalls and achieve their dreams. By showing them the possibilities that open up if they work with you, it becomes much easier for you to turn your viewers into students.

Determine Areas That Can Be Cut

Of course, no marketing campaign is perfect. Any advertising effort is going to have areas with unnecessary spending, and part of optimizing your marketing budget is finding these areas and trimming them back a bit. If you’ve performed your audits, made the necessary adjustments, and still aren’t seeing results from certain advertising campaigns, it might be worth making some slight cuts here and there. Bear in mind that your marketing budget should remain almost entirely intact, with your cuts, if there are any, only targeting the problem areas.

Refocus Your Efforts

With some minor cuts done, you should have a bit of extra cash freed up. Remember, though, that for most educational institutions, excess funding doesn’t roll over between years, so it’s best to not let that money sit around for too long. Instead, redirect the money to the most successful parts of your marketing campaigns to further bolster their reach and effectiveness.

Once you’ve redirected your funds, continue to carefully monitor the remaining parts of your marketing campaign. Ensure that they’re continuing to produce the high RoI you need, and if they stop doing so, repeat the audit process as needed. Eventually, you should be able to reach a sort of equilibrium in which your marketing campaign consistently yields the results you’re looking for.

Give Your Campaign a Makeover

If your campaign continues to underperform, though, don’t throw in the towel just yet! Chances are, all your advertising efforts need are a little bit of adjusting. For example, it’s worth examining the strategy you’re using. Marketing is more than just tossing a few advertisements out into the wild and waiting for people to engage. Rather, it requires careful planning, a solid strategy, and time. Without that sense of direction to guide your campaign, you may not see the results you’re looking for.

This is when getting in touch with a third-party team of industry experts can prove extremely useful in your decision-making process. With years of experience in digital marketing and serving higher education institutions like yours, our team at Greenstone Media can help you build the effective marketing campaign you’ve been looking for. 

We offer:

• Comprehensive Marketing Audits and Blueprints (so you have a clear plan)
• Detailed Consulting and Reporting (for ongoing campaign effectiveness)
• Copywriting and Design Overhauls (to boost engagement)
• Enrollment Funnel Creation and Setup (CRO to capture and convert more leads)
• Campaign Execution and Management (so you don’t have to)

For the results you want, the advertisements you need, and a team you can trust to utilize your budget effectively, get in touch with us today!