4 Positive Ways to Use Your Budget

As the financial year draws to a close, many of us scramble to find effective ways to use our remaining budget. We fought so hard for every penny, and carefully built business cases for every project. Now we have to spend it or face a smaller budget next year.

Here are 4 ways you can use that budget intelligently.

1. Get Planning

Financial years typically coincide with planning cycles, so use your budget to improve those plans. Now is a great time to do research projects, customer surveys, conduct marketing testing.
Check your strategy for next year and see where you can add some extra power, weight or assurance. Next year could be the year you try something new, and now you have the budget to invest in that!

2. Get Marketing

We spend the whole year trying to justify value-for-money, making compromises on quality. Now is a good time to focus on quality in a positive way. The Marketing Leaders that I know like to use their remaining budget to invest in quality-improvement projects for the following year. They invest in freelance designers, to refresh websites and social media; in trying new channels, such as testing the impact of influencer campaigns; in buying stock for the coming year, such as corporate gifts or promotional merchandise.

3. Get Investing

Every year at BrandHK, we review our technology. We look at the tools we use to manage all of our processes from design software to project management tools. This is a a good time to spend a bit of budget on new technology licences to try working in a more effective way.

BrandHK PromoShop

Here`s a plug for BrandHK: Our PromoShop service helps customers to manage their budget better by purchasing stock in advance. We manage that stock and distribute it as you need it. It saves storage space and gives you a really easy web-store interface to request deliveries and share the catalogue with colleagues.
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In a similar vein, this is the perfect excuse for equipping your team with the skills they need to deliver your strategy. That course on market research that your colleague wanted to do. That team-building day you have been meaning to organise. These are great investments in your people!

4. Get Motivating

You are reaching the end of the financial year, and now is the time to really recognise, reward and motivate your staff. Everyone enjoys feeling appreciated. If your company enjoyed a successful year or your team has gone above and beyond, why not use money to reward employees at the end of the year?

Employee recognition creates loyalty and better performance. And it should be something seperate from money to have real value. So have that team lunch, give out awards to the best performers, best team players, and anything else you want to encourage or highlight. And give your employees gifts that will mean something - it can be humourous, serious or practical - but give them with a personal message.

Those were 4 positive ways you can use your budget underspend this year.

Have an amazing 2024!