Use it or lose it: five ideas to spend your remaining website or marketing budget
When you approach the end of your financial year it’s quite common to have budget that hasn’t been used up. While it’s obviously good to effectively manage and control your spending, there can sometimes be a negative impact. Firstly, there is the feeling that you’ve missed out on investing in something that would be impactful. Secondly, there is also the chance that your budget for the following year will be reduced, based on your actual spend this year.
If this is the case here are five ideas of what to spend your remaining budget on. Of course, you’re very welcome to spend your spare budget with 3chillies, but we also love to see teams investing in new apps, skills and content. Here’s our five ideas!
- Training for your team
One of the most common pots of budget that doesn’t get used up is the training budget. Frequently this its outside your normal budget, with a standard amount set aside for your team or for each person. One problem for web teams is that they are often so busy that they don’t have time for learning or training. However, this is a missed opportunity. If there is any budget left it might be the time to take a course that helps you to:
- Use your CMS or DXP in more advanced ways
- Get up to speed with emerging topics like AI.
- Train in an important topic such as accessibility or SEO.
- Learn more technical or coding skills
- Or get a refresher on softer skills.
All these will not only prove interesting but can help you in your day-to-day work and your professional development.
- Content including imagery or photography
Among the clients most content is produced in-house, although this can be time-consuming. If you have additional budget one idea might be could be to work with an external content provider to work on some new content, rewrite old content or translate content into a different language. This could save you time but also produce pages or an asset that is more difficult to create in-house.
New content can also include imagery or photography, so you could commission new brand-approved images or photos. More generally, you could even subscribe to a media library.
Finally, if you do have budget, you could try something more experimental with multimedia content, like a podcast or video. If you’ve been thinking about this for a while and you have a pot of money that keeps on saying “spend me” then this could be the perfect time.
- Additional apps to add to your digital ecosystem
While most of our clients have one Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to deliver their website, they also rely on a variety of other solutions to support their overall customer experience or digital marketing efforts. Commonly this might be an analytics or social media management solution, but there are also a huge array of cloud-based apps that can help measure, improve, automate and manage your digital experience. If you have something to spend, there might be an app that can help, for example, to:
- support the readability of your content
- better deliver analytics
- better test for SEO and aid keyword research
- do the heavy lifting around cookie management
- streamline your social media management
- use AI to help generate content
- test for accessibility
- and more!
- Get a plug-in, connector or add-on to extend your CMS or DXP
Another area to spare spend budget on and similarly extend the power of your digital ecosystem is to purchase a plug-in, connector or add-on to your current CMS or DXP. Most of the big CMS players have a marketplace facility where additional capabilities either supported by the vendor themselves or via trusted partners can be acquired.
For example, Umbraco has a number of robust add-ons including Umbraco Connect (previously UMarketingSuite) which adds A/B testing, personalisation, profiling and analytics to Umbraco. These of extras may support some of the areas we listed in the last point but note that it important to check if there is any associated technical support requiring additional investment that will be needed for implementation.
- Get a review or health check of your site
Sometimes it is worth getting an external expert review of your site or digital project to suggest any changes that can be made to improve aspects such as performance, SEO, security, accessibility, findability and more. There are a range of technical and marketing experts who will be able to provide a health check, audit or site review and make recommendations. Sometimes these health checks are available at a fixed price and are actually very reasonable for the insights and potential value they can deliver. For example, we perform a site audit when we onboard a new client, but we also carry these out independently when people are looking for an independent assessment of their site, CMS or hosting environment.
We hope these ideas give you food for thought. If you want to discuss any of these then get in touch!
