A few weeks ago, we published a 3-part series on how to determine your aerospace and defense industry marketing budget - you can find Part 1: Budget Trends here, Part 2: Budget Building here, and Part 3: ROI here. However, a frequently asked question we receive from clients remains: how do we cut back on marketing spending without cutting results?

And here is your answer.

Stay Up To Date

Take an in-depth look through your marketing strategies to ensure you aren't spending money on outdated marketing practices, such as cold calling, clickbait social media posts, or trying to serve the masses.

What's Not Working - Where do you currently see your return on investment? For example, one of our specializations as an aerospace and defense marketing agency is to craft digital ads specifically for lead generation. And with our strategies, they often see the most success with these specific ads. We recommend keeping their budget in this area and other strategies that have a clear ROI instead of allocating money for ideas that are currently not generating promising results. Though it's important to practice the test-and-learn method in marketing, it's not the time for experimenting when looking to cut down your budget.

Quality Over Quantity - When juggling numerous aspects of a marketing strategy, it can be too easy to assume that more is better. It's just not the case. Continuing the previous example, we advise clients to make the best quality ads and continue to target their customers, potential customers, or ideal personas for their lead generation instead of spending money on more generalized ads to a broader audience. Again, we are not trying to market to the masses.

Create Reusable Content - When creating content, it's imperative, time-wise, and money-wise to curate content that is reusable. For instance, when writing lead generation ad copy, think through how you can add to your website, blog, infographic, videos, and other social media posts. Additionally, we highly recommend repurposing user-generated content through social media; it helps connect customers to your brand and indicates that you are active and available online. 

Evaluating Your Spending Cuts

You know we couldn't finish off this blog without talking about measuring your results. When making budget cuts, make sure to start evaluating changes immediately. You may come to realize that it may be more efficient to protect specific spending that spurs consumer consideration of your products or services.

These practices hinge on currently having the right tools and capabilities for modern marketing, i.e., persistent learning mentality for an industry that is continuously changing, reliable reporting, data-driven strategies, and adept marketing experts. If that isn't your organization right now, let's connect and talk through how those things might help - and yes, cut down your marketing budget. These capabilities will benefit a marketing operation not only in a crisis but will also help your organization flourish at any stage of the economic cycle.

Given the uncertainty of the current times, we also want to note that the pandemic has put us all in a funk and though these tips will help you pare down a marketing budget, weathering an economic downturn is a whole other beast. And it may be what your organization needs right now. If it is, check out this resource here.

About Aerospace Marketing Lab

Aerospace Marketing Lab brings more than 20 years of complex aerospace marketing, sales, branding, and strategy development experience and insight to every customer. We understand aerospace’s complex marketing and sales models. We use this insider knowledge to break boundaries and raise aerospace and defense clients to the next level.