Having a digital marketing strategy that works for your business is a good thing. Digital marketing is essential for all modern businesses. The scope of digital marketing can be huge. It can include multiple channels such as emails, social media, PPC, blogs, video marketing, and so on. When creating a marketing strategy, it is essential to come up with a marketing budget. Read on for useful steps for allocating your budget.
Use a marketing budget tracker
It is important to have a structured budget template. This document should have your budget and track expenses and carefully analyse variance. Without the right budget tracker, you can assess marketing spend and adjust accordingly to improve return on investment.
A marketing budget tracker will allow you to visualise and organize it categorically. Reviewing your past budget trackers and analysing them can help you inform future marketing budgets for your business by factoring in actual spend, proposed spend, and the results of the allocation.
Review the marketing goals of your company
Before allocating your budget, your team should be aligned on the top priorities of your organization for the upcoming period and which initiatives that marketing will support. E.g., your company may make significant hiring in the next four months. In this scenario, various sectors may need to work together with the social media team to post available roles on social media. However, it will not require dipping into the budget of your marketing team.
Review the results of your previous year and quarter
Work with your marketing agency to review the results of your previous quarter and year. Your budget is a continuous project that requires constant analysis. Maybe you poured a lot of money into Facebook and only saw a few conversions. If this is the case, you can pause those campaigns that do not bring in sales.
Continuously reviewing the performance of your marketing will help you allocate money more appropriately. During the review process, you should find out activities that contributed to your bottom line, whether it makes sense to grow the budget or maintain it in certain areas, the marketing activities that didn’t contribute to your bottom line and those that got worse.
Determine the right channels
Your marketing channels will vary depending on your industry. You should know whether you need to do outreach, whether it is an inbound strategy and whether you should target groups based on behaviours to decide the most appropriate channels for your business.
Consider production costs, salaries and agency costs
Your marketing budget should account for every aspect possible to produce quality results such as salaries, software fees, market research costs, payroll, website costs and agency fees.
Finalise your budget
After considering and factoring in additional costs and knowing where to channel funds for your digital marketing strategy, it is time to finalise your budget and submit it for review and approval. You should include any details that may be gathered during the research process that will support your case. You should have more specifics to make things easier for you.