Corporate teams and their owner operators are not satisfied with the high fees required to advertise locally. Here’s how you can avoid high fees and drive the highest return on your investment with tech enabled digital marketing.

What does Slack, Square, Shopify, Tesla, and Netflix have in common? They were all built to solve today’s problems in a more elegant and accessible way. So why are your marketing options still either manual, complicated, and expensive? We live in a tech enabled world.

Cutting marketing costs will have a direct impact on your marketing returns. Providing easy to use tools that modernize your marketing helps your business adapt customer information as counties and states implement new rules for operating a safe business.

Here are six ways to generate profits through marketing without paying high fees.

1. Get a bigger slice of your media budget. Don’t pay a percentage.

Most companies who place media will charge a percentage based on the media dollars spent. This model is not pro customer as it essentially rewards the company you hired with more fees as you increase your media spend. Does that sound fair?

Instead pay a flat fixed fee not dependent on your media budget. This can be the business model of technology based SaaS (Software as a service) companies. If you want to learn more about the hidden tax in placing media, see this article.

2. Lean into the efficiency digital media provides. Pay for the highest performing media channel

Are you pinning your entire customer acquisition strategy on one media channel like social or search? While social media, paid search, display, or video are great investments, just doing one in a silo doesn’t provide the data to measure against to drive your media performance.

Human analysis and optimization are inefficient and costly. And with all the issues affecting a restaurant’s bottom line—rising rent, food cost, minimum wage, etc.—local marketing shouldn’t be one of them. That is why automation is so key to digital advertising. Restaurant operators and multi-unit franchisors should be able to set in motion their digital advertising strategy and have a smart machine doing the legwork in the background, while they get back to running their business.

Work with a company that has machine learning media optimization. This means that all major channels work at the same time and the channel that converts at the highest return garners the most budget. Other other channels are simultaneously marketing but media allocation is solely defined by the performance of your marketing spend in real time. This removes the “I think this media works better” human bias.

3. Let real time customer response decide which creative receives the most budget.

Ever get attached to a certain creative you thought would do well but didn’t?

Been surprised one ad works better than another? In today’s digital marketing world, there are so many different sizes, lengths, colors, formats across many different digital marketing options. It’s enough to make your head spin.

You’ve heard of AB testing. If you haven’t, AB testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

Real time marketing powered by today’s modern software enables not just an AB test, but an always on ABCDEFG…and so on test 24 hours a day across your creative options. The creative getting the most response garners more budget disproportionately.

Let your consumers vote with their wallet, click, or other sign of intent based on the creative that resonates most with them.

4. Experiment with your budget, it doesn’t have to be static.

You will have busier months than others. Holiday and seasonal periods may drive more demand. You should be able to adjust budgets whenever you would like without having to contact someone or hold to a certain minimum. While laying out a quarterly or annual media budget is prudent, you should not be locked into a monthly spend you can’t change when you want, how you want, based on customer data. With modern technology platforms, you can change your budget by the day, hour, month—whenever you want to lower or increase your demand. It’s all about experimentation.

5. Say goodbye to spreadsheets and hello to real-time data in the palm of your hands.

Spreadsheets for marketing performance expire the minute they are distributed. Don’t you find they are filled with jargon anyway? With a real time visual dashboard, you can understand how your marketing investment is performing any minute of any day, right from the palm of your hand.

Instead of how many likes, retweets, or clicks ads you received, how about a deep understanding of your ad performance in easy to understand graphics and visuals? What demographic is responding? What channel and creative is performing best? What’s the correlation of your online sales vs your spend for the month?

This exists in marketing technology and enables businesses small and large a deeper understanding of their marketing investment.

6. Stay visible online → Organic vs. paid marketing.

If you want your business to be successful, you have to start marketing. Even in tough times.

While customers finding you through organic methods are important, you are optimizing your business towards the small percentage of customers who seek you out. That can be less than 1% of customers in your local area. Supplement your organic methods with paid marketing so your potential customers know you exist.

Today’s marketing technology can help you save costs, boost performance, and give you greater visibility into your marketing expenditures. The old ways of advertising can be improved in a very noticeable way. For more information on just how to take advantage of the marketing technology revolution, drop me a line at adam@eulerity.com.

Adam Chandler is COO and co-founder of Eulerity, a marketing platform which powers successful small businesses & local enterprises by simplifying digital marketing and the impact on point of sale. Contact him at adam@eulerity.com