Note: This blog post was updated on 12/20/22 to further address the topic of social media influencers.

As the number of marketing opportunities and vehicles has multiplied drastically in the last 20 years — due to the many and diverse tactics available online — marketing professionals have found themselves having to spread their thin marketing budgets even more thinly. While the number of opportunities for product and service promotion and awareness-generation has grown, most marketers have found their budgets haven’t, and therefore, they need to constantly be thinking about how to maximize marketing dollars.

I’ve recently been involved with and/or had the good fortune of learning from a couple of strategies employed by prospective or current clients that I believe very much maximize marketing budgets, and I wanted to share those below.

Co-marketing/Co-branding

An effective way of both achieving marketing objectives and maximizing marketing spend is to partner up with another organization to jointly achieve respective marketing objectives — sales and/or awareness. Whether it be through a product or service offering that bears both organizations’ names, a rebate or instant redemption when different products offered by two distinct organizations are simultaneously purchased, or simply through a promotion such as a contest, sweepstakes, or giveaway, joint or co-marketing by organizations can go a long way in minimizing dollars spent while maximizing awareness. After all, doesn’t it make good mathematical sense that if ABC company has brand recognition among a certain percentage or slice of the population, and XYZ company among another slice, that both companies will grow awareness, and hopefully sales, of their company’s products among loyal consumers of the other company’s products. In addition, one of the companies may specialize and have great success in resonating with a desired target audience with which the other company hopes to resonate.

Benefits Of Fan Sharing and Use Of Social Media Influencers

While fame-seeking individuals who try to ride the coattails of celebrities in hopes of gaining fame for themselves are often recognized or criticized for doing so, in the world of marketing products and services, not trying to piggyback on appropriate individuals’ or organizations’ success likely means a missed opportunity. And, while there are many ways to incorporate people who are well-known and well-respected into a marketing campaign — for example, those people could be used as spokespeople for your brand or appear in your advertising — because of all the focus on online/digital marketing these days, the opportunity I will discuss here pertains to employing both bloggers and vloggers in your marketing.

Whether an external party publishes regular posts to their online blog on topics relevant to your line of business, or they appear in and produce relevant-topic videos that they host on platforms like YouTube, if that external party has a large fan following, you should give strong thought to how you might involve them in the promotion of your product or service. While the compensation vloggers and bloggers (talents) expect varies greatly, if you’re willing to take the time to do an extensive search, you’re likely to identify talents who are willing to talk or write about your product or service and/or show it in use at a rate that’s acceptable to you. And, both your organization and the talents will benefit from being able to share whatever post or video you jointly create among each of your sets of fans and followers.

Pros and Cons Of Hiring A Social Media Influencer To Promote Your Products and Services

Commentary added on 12/20/22: depending on the nature of the individual or organization you ask to collaborate with your own organization to promote a particular product, service or solution, target audiences may automatically recognize that your brand has engaged a “social media influencer” to help you market your organization and may or may not look favorably upon that. There are pros and cons to being known for using social media influencers in your advertising/marketing. At this point in time, many individuals recognize that individuals who make a career out of being a social media influencer (and who aren’t famous or known for any other reason), as well as celebrities (individuals who are famous for other reasons such as sports players, movie stars, television actors) are getting paid to represent your product or service, and so audiences wonder are those celebrities/social media influencers a credible source of information, and should they be believed? On the other hand, many products and services have blown their sales numbers out of the water by getting a popular social media influencer or celebrity to promote their products and services. We’re glad to talk the pros and cons over with your organization, but hope you’ll find this expert’s thoughts helpful too.

I welcome your thoughts on the two marketing opportunities I’ve discussed above for getting more bang from your marketing buck, and I’d love to hear other ideas from you on how to maximize marketing dollars during this unique time of endless opportunities.