When it comes to budgets and marketing I never imagined the small things would actually cost so much. It really is amazing what overlooking a simple item can do to a budget that is meant to cut costs for a company. This happened this year. The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic caused our company to shift a little of what it normally has others do for it to a more internal workforce. We decided to move some of our marketing inside and we are now doing all of our direct mailings online. This has meant that we needed to purchase a lot of supplies to do our own direct mailing marketing and some of the items ended up costing a whole lot for not being so effective. The fact is that what we all think works well is not the correct answer when it comes to doing this professionally. We learned many lessons and I must say that I wanted to share a few so any other companies who are trying to thrive during this hard economic time will be able to.
The answer for most of our problems came through learning from others outside. It really is an amazing task for learning how to save money and do it in ways we never imagined. At first, our goal was to have our own staff to take some time out of their days to work on each project. This was an area we thought we could cut costs and we decided it was only fair if we all pitched in equally. In a regular, we realized that most of us messed around for about an hour a day trying to either be social or just taking breaks. So we knew that each member of our company could take one hour a day to work on marketing and be social and try to enjoy it. That was our goal and it seems that most people really don't mind the break from their work. But even our CEO is putting shipping supplies together each day and to be honest, I think She loves it too.
Now the first thing we had to do was to plan out our projects and get teams together to do the same thing consistently. So we created shifts for each stage of our direct mailing projects. This meant that we would have one group print lables and put them on a letter with a stamp. In one hour we could have up to 500 of those ready to go and then the next group would take the letters and fold them and put them in the envolopes. Then they could have 500 almost ready to go. But we then had the last group seal the letters and put a wax stamp on them. It was truly a process and it turned out to be the fastest way to get everythign done in shifts.
What we learned from thsi was that we could call up packaging supplies companies and learn how to use the correct items for each project. We also found that these companeis had big discounts for shipping supplies when ordered in bulk. That was when we were gettign tips from these companies that were tips they gave to full on marketing companeis on the products to use and what would actualyl cut costs. This is how we did it and our budget was cut by 39%. Best of Luck!
