A vital element of a marketing plan is to make a budget, which determines how much you have to expend on which marketing strategies. To develop a marketing budget first, you need to identify your business goals and the optimal channels for reaching your customers. The expenditure may vary according to the business industry, location, and goals. Do this research before setting your budget.
Here are some ways to develop a marketing budget:-
1. Identifying your marketing goals
To set an adequate marketing budget, you need to determine a marketing plan in which you must include both the short-term and long-term goals. Your market in the first place either to boost gross revenue or to create a sales funnel,
For this, you have to be specific with your goals. You may need to tweak your goals to distribute the marketing campaigns.
Short-term goal examples :
- Decrease the website bounce rate by 5%.
- Obtain ten quality comments on social media posts per week.
- Increase brand awareness by generating 100 new social media channel followers each week or each month.
Long-term goal examples :
- Create a sales funnel that produces new customers consistently over the next three years.
- Secure the first page of google for the three of your prime focus keywords.
- Enlarge your marketing automation flow with email marketing.
2. Understanding your target audience
In the business, a persona concerns perception. Create buyer personas through research, surveys, and interviews. You can have more than one buyer personas, but make sure not to have more than five, as not everyone can be your target audience.
These are some ways to gather data to help you create your buyer personas :
- Survey your current target customers.
- Use Google Analytics to decide the audience demographics.
- Use Facebook Insights to notice user interaction with your brand.
Include this information in each buyer’s persona :
- Geographic Location
- Age
- Profession
- Marital status
- Education
- Approximate income
- Sources they visit for information
- Motivation and goals
- What makes their life easier?
- Social media channels they use frequently.
3. Select your marketing channels
To get the best return on the revenue you spend, you have to break down the marketing channels into four categories :
- Digital Marketing
These marketing channels include social media marketing, automated or manual email marketing, online content marketing, online advertising with social media ads (paid media), or pay-per-click ads, and search engine optimization.
- Brand awareness campaigns
These marketing channels help your audience recognize you with your brand name, associated with a particular product or service. Branding establishes the reputation of your company.
One of the ways through which you can measure your brand awareness is to take a survey on the website asking how people came to know about you, asking current customers when they came to know about your brand, etc.
- Inbound Marketing
These are SEO(s), blogs, podcasts, videos on the YouTube channel, ebooks, infographics, and other types of content marketing.
- Outbound Marketing
While inbound marketing attracts your best prospects via online solutions, outbound marketing allows you to target messages strategically and get immediate results.
Having a better idea of these marketing channels and considering them as a part of your marketing plan, you can determine your budget ideally. There are the expenses associated with each of the above channels, among them social media advertising is more profitable and cost-effective.
4. Tracking your marketing budget
Tracking your marketing budget is the primary factor to measure its success. You can easily track your marketing costs using Microsoft Excel, which is sufficient for it.
- Lead Tracking
Lead tracking gives marketers an understanding of how the sales funnel works. It determines the prospective customers, actively monitors where leads are present in the sales, based on individual actions and sales rep touches. Adjust one critical factor at a time.
- Campaign Tracking
Campaign tracking refers to identifying how users discover your site. You should use it in Google Analytics to track online advertising campaigns to your website accurately, either from Google Ads or from other advertising resources.
These suggestions would help entrepreneurs prepare to plan a marketing budget that will yield results without negatively impacting the bottom line.
