Typically, a reasonable marketing budget is around 11% of a company’s revenue – but allocating for appropriate marketing, and understanding how to get the most bang for your buck, is not always that simple.
For businesses of all sizes, setting a budget can be an extensive process that involves a tremendous amount of analysis. Whether you have a larger company with a multitude of teams and marketing campaigns, or a smaller or younger organization without the necessary people and resources, this process can be especially exhausting, especially when you take into account your revenue situation (or lack thereof!)
What Does a Marketing Budget Cover?
You should start your budget by considering all the marketing activities that your company plans to invest in, on a yearly or quarterly basis. This includes everything from digital advertising and social media advertising, print ads, billboards, new hires, and new technology.
Make the Most of Your Strategic Marketing Budget
Here are some key ways to ensure that your marketing efforts are backed up by efficient planning.
Social Media Can Maximize Your Budget
Social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, offer many cost-effective ways to promote your company and your brand.
Before assigning a percentage of your marketing budget to your social media advertising efforts, you need to determine your exact target audiences and how you want to engage with them.
For example, Facebook ranks higher, with 2.4 billion users connected worldwide, while male users between the ages of 25 and 34 are the largest demographic. So, this platform is the right choice if you cater to this target audience. If you are targeting an older or more professional demographic, LinkedIn would likely be your best bet for spending your dollars. It’s all about being where your audiences already are.
Repurpose an Existing Marketing Campaign
Creating a marketing campaign from scratch might incur more costs than updating one that already exists. And it will also save a lot of time and money! If you rework the successful aspects of your previous campaigns, you can ultimately reach your goal.
Similarly, to reduce your costs, time, and effort, you can recycle content and use it in new formats. For instance, you can turn a blog post into an infographic, cut a long video into shorter clips, and create a podcast out of a video. Feel free to get creative!
Engage in Email Marketing
Direct mail can be quite expensive when compared to email marketing, while the latter provides better value to your investment. According to Hubspot, if you are spending $1 of your budget on email marketing, you will get $38 as your ROI.
Let Your Customers Work For You
Many brands use word-of-mouth marketing instead of investing heavily in paid advertising. An effective word-of-mouth strategy can exponentially increase customer engagement and sales for your business. Encouraging your customers to share their love on social media, leave reviews, or spread the word to their friends are ways of spurring this kind of engagement.
Also, paid advertising platforms such as Google are becoming more competitive, thus putting pressure on a brand’s gross margins. Word-of-mouth is an alternate technique that requires less investment and benefits you with its snowball effect that leads to more reach and more consumers.
90% of customers purchase from a brand based on recommendations from friends or family. Similarly, 75% of people think that advertisements do not reflect the real face of a product or business, while 62% of users make up their minds based on customer and peer reviews.
Create High-Quality Content
Creating quality content is a great way to gain the exposure you need, especially since the investment required for blogging, podcasts, and social media-style videos is comparatively low to traditional methods.
Businesses that use blogs as a form of marketing earn 67% more leads than companies that don’t. Blogging is a simple and extremely effective way to market your product. Frequently updated articles with fresh, quality content also rank higher on Google and other search engines – ultimately leading to more value (in terms of targeted traffic) for your investment.
Creating a marketing budget that maximizes key tactics and without breaking the bank is possible. The most important thing to keep in mind is to be clear about your goals, understand how to maximize marketing mediums, and make use of existing resources to get more return on investment.