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Managing Resource Trade-offs
As small business owners, you know better than anyone that resources are scarce. And, allocating and managing your valuable resources is one of the most difficult tasks. In order to make the right marketing decisions, you are likely to make trade-offs, so your limited resources can get effectively allocated to meet different needs. And, the decisions associated with doing so are highly interdependent. As small business marketing consultants, we would highly recommend developing methods to manage trade-offs as that would prevent losing market share and / or losing customer / product segments.
As owners of small businesses, you could potentially undertake one or more of the following approaches to manage your resource trade-offs:
Data-driven approach
This approach focuses on using historical data to see what outcomes have been evoked by your past trade-off decisions. This will provide insights on whether you should continue or revamp your current resource allocation method(s).
The Heuristics approach
In the absence of hard data about the attractiveness of each resource option, you could solve the resource allocation problem using simple rules of thumb, driven by intuition and judgment. These solutions are also called “heuristics.” As one of Australia’s longest standing marketing consultancies for small business, we’ve learnt so much about small business owners, your mindset, what works and what doesn’t. In accordance with that, we are confident that our expertise will aid in managing your marketing budget and activities effectively to achieve your business objectives.
Experimental Attribution approach
As experienced marketing consultants, we know that it is often the case that you, as small business owners have to make quick decisions about whether to commit resources and how much. This method could help you address this challenge. This approach involves intervention, outcome, design of the experimental condition, and control condition.
Intervention refers to an action whose effectiveness is to be tested in a controlled experiment. For example, the action that you might want to undertake is the level of search advertising to pursue. The experiment would adjust this level in a limited fashion, such as increasing search advertising expenditures by 10% in the eastern region. Then comes the outcome of interest, which refers to the expected consequence due to an intervention. The design of the experiment also requires consideration of precisely when, where, and to whom it administers the intervention. This might involve choosing a particular platform to conduct your search advertising, only on Google (and not any other search engines), for example. Control condition refers to a subsample / group within a controlled experiment which does not receive the intervention or stimulus.
Experiments like this will help isolate the impact of the specific marketing instrument being studied. Experiments also are useful when you have not tried something before and want to test its impact for the first time. The firm deliberately generates a scenario that enables it to quantify the financial impact of the marketing resource that it alters through the experiment.
Regardless of how young or old your small business is, you should consider reaching out to Little Marketing as our dedicated Sydney/Brisbane marketing consultants for small business about making sure you're achieving your business goals while managing your marketing activities with utmost efficiency. To learn more, contact us here today.
