It’s this time of the year when companies are planning budgets for the coming months and deciding where and how they should market their brands/products.
Digital marketing involves many strategies and as consumers nowadays expect omnichannel experiences from brands, marketers have the big challenge on how to invest their budgets across many channels and strategies.
So how do you plan a budget that ensures your marketing strategies will succeed?
Set your goals
The best way to start planning your budget is to be very clear about your goals for the upcoming months. Having goals in place will allow you to prioritise the tactics that you should focus on the most.
For example, if you want to grow your business through the website, you should invest in channels that will help you increase traffic to the website like SEO or PPC as well as conversion optimisation.
Analyse the past
Once you know what you want to achieve in the coming months, you should look at your past to help inform your strategy and budget.
If you would like to grow your business through the website, in order to identify the best tactics to achieve that goal, you should analyse your past results to see which channels and tactics performed best in the past, as well as what hasn’t worked as you’d wanted it to.
Which channels drove the most traffic? Which ads generated the most leads? And so on.
When analysing data, keep your goals in mind so you’ll know which tactics will actually help you achieve these objectives.
Evaluate your options
Digital marketing involves many strategies and tactics such as SEO, paid search, social media marketing, content strategy, conversion optimisation, video marketing, influencer marketing, remarketing, etc. When you evaluate them, the most important things to consider are your marketing goals and overall business objectives as well as past results for these tactics.
New strategies
It’s important to remember that testing is fundamental when it comes to marketing.
You should always set some of your marketing budget aside simply for testing new marketing strategies and tactics. Some will work, some might not – but testing and experimenting are a big part of the job and how you introduce new and quality strategies to your overall digital marketing strategy.
Allocate budget
So, what should your marketing budget be?
Ideally, it’s recommended that your marketing budget is around 10% of your total business revenue.
Once you know exactly how much your budget is and have a list with all digital marketing strategies to use, it’s time to start allocating that budget to the various tactics.
As mentioned before, it’s best to allocate the bulk of your budget to any tactics that have proven successful in the past, while also ensuring that they’re in line with your goals.
There is no solution that works for everyone – each business is different, and recommendations will vary considerably depending on your industry and niche, your business goals and of course, your actual budget. That’s why you need to keep all these things in mind when you plan your budget and allocate resources.
Tools & software
Marketing is almost impossible without tools and software to help. You need tools for a variety of marketing tactics and it’s something that you shouldn’t forget about when planning a new budget or strategy.
One of the best aspects of digital marketing is that you don’t need to wait long for results.
You should analyse the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and evaluate how successful your marketing strategy and budget allocation have been from day 1. That will allow you to make any necessary adjustments quickly and deliver even better results.
