Balancing Your Marketing Portfolio

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By Cidnee Stephen | Published 01/14/2009 | Public Relations , Referrals , Advertising , Marketing Strategy , Marketing Tools , Personal Branding , Strategic Partnering | Rating:

Cidnee Stephen

Cidnee Stephen is a high energy and accomplished marketing professional. Born to market, she showed her creative side at a very young ago when she started marketing greeting cards and good ol’ lemonade in elementary school. To anyone that knew her, it was no surprise then that she chose marketing as her focus at University over 20 years ago. Of course most of the marketing principles she learned way back then suited large corporations. So when she was thrown into small business marketing years later, she found she needed to come up with some new approaches. Her techniques served her well and she continuously has been a top producer for the companies she has worked with. Having worked in Canada and Europe, Cidnee has called Calgary her home since the late 1990’s.

She started Strategies for Success in 1999 www.strategiesforsuccess.ca. Since then she has worked with over 100 entrepreneurs and small businesses to build sound marketing systems that get results! Cidnee is a sought after speaker on the elements of small business marketing. She speaks regularly in Calgary, as well as at national conferences and corporate functions. She also has written articles for magazines and corporate newsletters sharing her savvy marketing tips. She publishes the Marketing Excel-erator and will be launching her new book in 2008 "If You Aren't Getting the Business, You Don't Deserve It"

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Balancing Your Marketing Portfolio

So you have some money to spend on marketing. The big question is, how do you know what to spend it on to minimize risk and maximize return? The answer is through your balanced marketing portfolio.

We all understand the importance of having a balanced financial portfolio, but what about our marketing portfolio? If we invest the bulk of our marketing in limited activities, we are putting ourselves at risk of achieving a less than desirable return on our investment.

While in finance we want to balance risk and return, in marketing we want to balance 3 crucial elements – control, cost and credibility. Look at the diagram at the end of this article.

Each of these 3 areas has varied degrees of control, cost and credibility.

For example with advertising, we are pretty much in total control of when, where and how we place an ad. Of course we also have to pay more to have this control. But how much credibility do we gain by telling others we are great?

If we’re to rely heavily on advertising, chances are we could very quickly deplete our marketing budget before we reach our goals.

On the other hand if were to look at low cost items with high credibility, like PR and to some extent Referral marketing, we have very little control on when, where and how it occurs.

In this instance we could run out of TIME before we reach our goals.

Therefore, divide your budget up in 2 ways.

1. Allocate a lot of your marketing dollars to savvy advertising and promotions (the key here is savvy)!
2. Allocate more of your marketing TIME to referral marketing and PR activities.

Don’t forget. Just like your financial portfolio - it’s important to measure your return on investment on all your marketing activities as well!

Is your marketing portfolio balanced? Does it exist at all? If you answered no to either of these questions, chances are you are missing out on maximizing your bottom line and minimizing your costs and time.

Control Cost & Credibility Table

                                      Control       Cost        Credibility

Advertising                     High         High            Low
Referrals                       Medium      Low          Medium
Public Relations              Low          Low            High

How balanced is your portfolio?

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