Establish a digital marketing goal
You can’t create a plan, map, steps, or budget if you don’t know where you’re headed. Establishing marketing goals will help you to best figure out how much money you’ll need in order to accomplish them.
Creating your goals means deciding what results you’re going to be looking for in the coming year. Are you focusing solely on gaining conversions? Or are you interested in simply increasing awareness of your brand? Maybe you want to build a base of warm, qualified leads.
Whatever you’re looking to accomplish will be your goals. By understanding your unique goals, you’ll be able to determine how much money you need and the specific areas you need to focus your budget on.
Understand your marketing costs/revenue
Part of planning your budget is understanding all of your costs and your revenue. To know what you’re able to set aside for marketing purposes, you need to first know how much money you’ll have to work with and how much of that needs to be spent in other areas.
This means you’ll want to look at your operational costs, the cost you typically put out for each customer, and your average revenue attached to various marketing tactics. By understanding what you have to work with and where your money needs to go, you’ll be ready to budget for each of your marketing tactics.
” Before you can list the kind of expenses you may be in for, you must understand the 4P’s of the marketing mix: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. ”
Decide on a flexible budget
After you know your goals and your costs, you’ll be able to section off about what you need for marketing annually. After you determine your annual cost, you’ll be able to divide that into months in order to figure out what you can spend on marketing each month.
When you section your budget into months, you need to be flexible. That doesn’t mean be flexible on the prices each month. In fact, if you’re flexible on the monthly cost, you’ll end up robbing yourself in another month.
Instead, you want to be flexible with what you spend your monthly cost on. You may plan to use a certain amount of money on a specific strategy one month, but if you’re seeing success in another area, you may want to reallocate those funds to that area.
Be flexible about how you use each month’s marketing funds. Don’t strictly stick to your plan because you might just miss out on success.
” First and foremost, why do we need to set a budget? This should be obvious, we’re all in business to succeed and grow and accomplish our objectives. So setting a budget is simply a way to plan ahead and make sure we’re allocating enough resources to accomplish what we need to accomplish. ”
Test and measure your budget
Once you have a monthly budget set, you’ll want to test out your marketing strategies to make sure you’re not wasting that money. You can set up tests and watch the data to see if your intended marketing strategies are effective or not.
Focus on the number of website visitors you’re gaining as a result of your test campaign. Focus on the number of conversions you’re getting. If your data is looking good, you can be fairly confident that you’ve budgeted your funds well and that your marketing efforts will bring you the results that you want.
Digital Marketing Is No Longer An Afterthought!
Digital marketing isn’t optional any longer. Every business needs to devote a portion of their budget to digital marketing in order to ensure awareness, conversion, and loyalty. By establishing your goals, understanding your revenue and costs, as well as testing out your marketing ideas, you’ll be ready to create the marketing campaigns you need to ensure business success.
Contact Bold Eye Media & Let’s Create A Marketing Roadmap For Your Business!