Don‘t Cut Marketing Budgets

Fuel is to your motorcycle, as marketing is to your biker company’s sales. Marketing is your company’s revenue stream’s “fuel” and what keeps it going. If you crimp your gas line, your bike will slow down and not run right. Similarly, if you cut your marketing budget, your sales will quickly slow down, and your company will not run right.

With the above analogy, you can see why drastically cutting your marketing budget is problematic. When you make a significant cut, you are lowering the budget for marketing for your website, SEO, web design, social media, newsletters, advertising, etc. These play a critical role in generating your motorcycle website’s revenue. To see the value, check out these online marketing statistics.

I am not saying this because we provide these search engine services. The article below explains why you don’t want to cut marketing and offers some alternatives.

First, cutting your marketing budget kills both your short-term and long-term sales. It is an “out of sight, out of mind” situation with your prospects, new customers, repeat customers, and lifetime customers; they won’t think of your company or products if they don’t see them. Hopefully, your manager and motorcycle business owner understand this before they make cuts.

Improve Your Biker Sites’ Bottom Line

Next, from a financial perspective, how can you improve your bottom line? First, you can increase your revenue. Second, you can decrease expenses.

And your website’s marketing expert is a big part of your sales. Your marketing agency’s role might differ if the economy is a disaster. In that case, it might just be to keep your sales at the same level. Keeping the motorcycle business open during challenging economic times can be an accomplishment.

Incorrectly assigning blame to your marketers for not performing in a poor economy is a big problem, especially when there is precise marketing data for the reasons behind lower sales.

Now, true marketing experts, whether internal employees or an external marketing agency, have other options. If they can’t convince higher-ups of the reality, beating their heads against the wall gets old fast. Eventually, they will quit.

The same goes for being blamed for problems they can’t solve without a budget. Again, this is another way they’ll leave your company. Then you’re down a marketing person. This means your motorcycle company either has one less person or no one to do the remaining marketing items in your budget.

Next, hiring a new marketing expert takes time. And it is important that you understand the difference between hiring a rider and a passenger marketer. It will also take the new person time to ramp up, during which time your revenue will slow. Also, your new marketing expert will quit if unrealistic expectations are still pushed.

Marketing Expenses

Notably, sales aren’t the only goal of biker marketing. Granted, they should pay for themself. And by this, I’m talking about the net after the following marketing expenses are subtracted:

• Cost of advertising directly related to your product’s sales.
• Cost of the product sold/cost of goods sold.
• Handling expense
• Packaging expense
• Price of shipping: The total shipping cost is often not included in the final sales price. And this is because free shipping usually helps close sales. So, whatever part of the total shipping cost is not collected in sales should be included as a sales expense.
• The amount of salary/pay your marketing person receives is directly related to a particular marketing or sales effort.

Benefits of Breaking Even

What value does breaking even bring to your business? One is for branding your motorcycle company and website. And the more positive interactions and transactions there are, the better for your branding. Another reason to break even is to get rid of dead stock, which are motorcycle products with low demand and low turnover.

Here’s an example with a motorcycle rally shirt. Let’s say you have a Harley dealership. After a bike rally, your company has shirts left over. As you know, riders won’t be interested in buying last year’s shirt. Next, your HD dealership has spent money on the bike rally’s shirts. And they need to be liquidated to get the cost of the shirts back.

Hopefully, your dealership made good money before or during the rally selling the shirts. Of course, your dealership should have anticipated that all your shirts wouldn’t be sold. Subsequently, the owner or managers of your biker business will have put together a sales forecast. And they should understand the necessity of liquidating unsold inventory. All that being said, with dead stock, someone needs a marketing plan to execute that plan.

Increasing the Size of Sales

One way to increase your net profit is by increasing the amount of each sale on your motorcycle site. This can be accomplished in several ways:

• Increase the total sales amount.
• Sales bundles are where multiple related motorcycle products are sold together. They are usually sold at a discount, but the total revenue and net profit will be higher when selling more than one product.
• Cross-selling is where riders buy additional items that they might be interested in.
• Up-selling – An example of up-selling is someone buying the premium version of a motorcycle product rather than the standard version.

Next, to do the above correctly, a marketing person is needed. They must have the skills, know the history of bikers & biker world, and ride.

Also, the motorcycle website developer will most likely be involved. And this is so they can set up the up-selling or cross-selling. If it is already set up, there’s a good chance it will need to be tweaked by the designer to accomplish new goals.

Just like your motorcycle needs maintenance and updates, your biker website needs maintenance. Without maintenance, your bike or website will break down, drastically impacting sales.

Examining Sales Expenses

Another way to make a motorcycle website profitable is to lower your expenses. And the first step is to examine your expenses.

Then, the marketing expert, accounting, and management must work together. Each brings unique value and insight to evaluating expenses. For instance, your marketing person will understand sales and marketing data. But web tools like Google Analytics or Facebook marketing reports aren’t easy for everyone to read.

Even if non-marketing people can read the data, your marketing person will likely need to interpret them. Finally, your biker marketing person must explain the reports to the others.

Raising Prices

Now, prices can be raised. But what if the product is a commodity? Note that by commodity, I mean that there are identical or nearly identical products. Here’s an example using a Harley jacket. Since they are sold at endless locations, they are a commodity. If it is sold by itself, riders will look at several items:

• Cost of the Harley jacket
• Shipping expense
• Company reputation
• The trust of the company selling the jacket
• Reviews and testimonials about the quality of your customer service and products or services

However, the total cost of the jacket will often be the deciding factor. Therefore, value must be added to sell this jacket at a higher price. For instance, free returns or free shipping are valued by motorcycle riders. Notably, this helps new or unknown motorcycle companies overcome the trust factor.

Another way to sell at a higher price is by providing a better buyer’s journey. You always want it to be easy for customers to buy. But the marketing person, with their tool’s data, can help improve the journey. When the journey is simple, it reflects well on your biker company. And when it is simple, your prospects won’t check out as many competitors’ websites.

One way to do this is by improving the motorcycle products’ pages. It would help if you made it so people can quickly and easily find all the information they need to purchase from your website on product pages. To do this, your marketing person, motorcycle SEO, and the web designer of the biker site will need to be involved.

Here are three other ways you can increase your sales:

• Increase the perceived value of your offering.
• Utilize the “zero-price effect” – This psychological phenomenon happens when you give away something free, and people put more value on that item than it is worth.
• Increase your sales with world-class customer service.

In summary, you don’t want to cut your marketing budget. It is what fuels sales. Plus, there are other options to increase your company’s revenue.