Marketing and advertising can run up the bills quickly. At the same time, they bring in more customers, brand attention, and thus money. So where do you stand? Is your advertising taking you up or down?

Here are 3 of the best ways to ensure that your marketing efforts are making you money rather than draining your budget.

1. Watch Out for Frequency Rates when Online

You don’t want to mindlessly blast your advertising over the internet and hope something comes through. Do that, and you will get less and less returns for your money spent every time your message is shown. The more times a consumer sees your ad, the likelier it is for them to get annoyed by it. This reduces the click-through rate and therefore the effectiveness of your campaign. Indeed, once the same person sees the same ad twice, click-through rate decreases by 8.91%. Seeing the same ad five times decks the CTR by 30%, while seeing it nine times or more cuts CTR by half. At the same time, the cost-per-click increases each time the ad is seen multiple times.

What can you do?

Keep a check on ad frequency and make use of other marketing channels like print.

2. Experiment with the Color Scheme

Are you aware that the color blue tends to make consumers feel calm? Green evokes a sense of peace, while yellow inspires optimism and happiness. Both your online and offline marketing campaign will benefit from a strategic use of color to inspire the desired emotions in your target audience. For example, a massage service may think of using blue and green in their messaging to inspire feelings of calm and a sense of peace, while a theme park may consider yellow since it inspires happiness and excitement.

3. Start Blogging

Not only are blogs cost-effective to run, they are pretty efficient as marketing tools. With your blog you can touch on all the topics that matter to you and your audience, including your products and how they can make the life of your audience better. Make sure you provide content that is of real value to your audience.

Once you readers realize that you genuinely want to help them with their content they will keep coming back to your blog. They are also likely to share your content with their friends who are more than likely to have the same problems as them--and this could lead to new customers.

You can get all these on the cheap by either writing your own blog posts if you are a decent enough writer or by outsourcing the work to content creator to do it for you.