If you are at the helm of your company’s marketing team, you are required to know how to manage an advertising budget. After all, your web design updates and paid ads do not run on an empty purse, and your company looks to you to manage the funds allocated to those marketing tactics.
You may know everything there is to know about social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO); however, when it comes to managing a marketing budget, you may be clueless. Even though managing a marketing budget may seem like a complex task, it is not too complicated once you learn to maximize your budget.
This blog post tells you everything you need to know about managing your marketing budget. Read on to discover how you can accomplish your marketing objectives without spending more money than you intended.
What Is A Marketing Budget?
A marketing budget documents how much money a company plans to spend on marketing. It also outlines where the company will allocate funds for different marketing strategies such as radio advertising, broadcast television advertising, OTT/CTV advertising, social media advertising and PPC ads over a specific period such as months, quarters or year.
What Are Marketing Costs?
Marketing costs are costs associated with marketing your business. These include website and content design, market research, copywriting and printing, marketing tools and promotional merchandise. You can add anything to this list that you can pump money into to increase revenue growth.
Do Small Businesses Need Marketing Budgets?
Small businesses need marketing budgets just as much as established organizations. A marketing budget helps small business owners put their marketing funds in the right place, convert leads to paying customers, promote new or existing products, scale up their businesses by effectively reaching their target audience, and grow their customer base. Without a budget, your brand will have a difficult time growing or outshining the competition.
How to Create a Marketing Budget
1. Know Your Audience’s Journey
Your audience’s journey is the process your audience goes through as they transition from potential customers to a paying customer. Knowing your audience’s journey helps you understand how your customers interact with your marketing and which goals you should set to appeal to customers.
2. Set Your Marketing Goals
It is a cliché, but when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. A good plan always begins with identifying your targets and goals. Know your KPIs. This is common knowledge, and we will not discuss the whole process here. If you have never set goals before, you can start by using the SMART method. You can also look at industry benchmarks to see how well you are performing against competitors. At this stage, you need to pick goals that are relevant to your business.
3. Download or Create a Marketing Budget Template
To keep track of expenses, you need to track your spending, and the simplest way to do so is by using a marketing budget template that you can refer to if need be or update to ensure you are on course.
For most businesses, important expenses include:
·Marketing Software
·Hosting and promoting your own events
·Digital advertising for social and search ads
· One-off campaigns to create awareness or generate leads
You can find and download a sample marketing budget online on any search engine. Once you have downloaded a template that works, ensure that you revisit and update it regularly. An outdated budget can negatively impact your advertising strategies because you will either spend money you do not have or misplace your budgeting priorities.
4. Do Not Concentrate All Efforts In One Area
You want your marketing mix to be as broad as possible with plenty of spend categories. Not only does this give you different ways to appeal to new customers, but it also helps you reduce the likelihood of risk.
Allocate budget to different campaign platforms and look at the expected ROI of each platform, how much you need to spend on each platform and the costs that will impact the ROI of each platform.
Whether you are a new business or an established organization, you need a budget to ensure that you are staying on target with planned spending and actual spending. At Brand Water, we can help you create a realistic budget that helps your business effectively promote its goods and services. We can also help you create a comprehensive budget that includes all the projects your team plans to undertake and covers all areas of marketing. Contact us today. We are here to help you ensure that you are only spending money on the efforts required to achieve your marketing goals.
How to Manage Your Marketing Budget
1. List The Platforms You Will Use For Marketing
Create a list of platforms you would like to spend your budget on and place the platforms on your list in order of priority. If your underlying goal is to increase website traffic, it makes no sense to use your Facebook ad spend to increase the number of fans on your page. Rather, it makes more sense to direct your marketing efforts towards keyword optimization.
You can build your marketing strategy through:
·Affiliate Programs
·Content Marketing
·Influencer Marketing
· PPC Marketing — Using Paid Search Platforms like Bing Ads or Google Ads
· SEO to make it easier to find your website on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other major search engines
2. Estimate the Cost and Potential Return on Investment (ROI) for Each Platform
Before you start splitting up your marketing budget across traditional marketing and digital marketing methods, you should estimate the potential costs and ROI for each platform.
Certain platforms are costlier than others and may yield a higher ROI, which you will realize much faster. The truth of the matter is, even though most PPC campaigns are costly, they come with a high ROI that you will realize quickly. Email marketing is also a great option because it is fairly priced and comes with a high yield.
On the other hand, social media marketing is fairly low cost if you handle everything yourself instead of hiring a content marketer to help you market your business. However, because it is based on establishing relationships, it can take longer to see any returns. When looking at the obvious costs of each platform, ensure that you look for the hidden costs that will affect your ROI, like marketing expenses associated with:
· Hiring Influencers for a Campaign
· Marketing events Promoting your Business
· Hiring an Agency to Execute Your Marketing Campaigns
· Developmental costs, Digital Advertising, and Business Cards
· Marketing Campaigns, PR Campaigns, and Crisis Management
· Hiring Marketing Teams to Help You with Graphics or Content Creation
3. Review Your Expenses
You should review your marketing expenses on a monthly or quarterly basis. This can prove challenging if multiple people can access your marketing expenses; therefore, to effectively and accurately track ad spending, you can use a financial or accounting tool that your entire marketing team can access.
4. Track and Analyze
In the marketing world, tracking and analyzing are crucial. You want to know which platforms yield the best results for your business so that you can pump your marketing money into those platforms and pull money from platforms that do not pull their weight. You can track and analyze using marketing budget templates that you find online.
If you are ready to create your 2022 budget plan and hire a marketing agency, Brand Water is here to help. With nearly 40 years of experience, we know how to create a marketing budget that meets your business’s needs and choose strategies that align with your budget. Call us today to learn more.
Contact the Marketing Experts for Professional Budget Creation
Most marketing leaders have little to no finance experience. As such, budgeting is unfamiliar territory to them. If you are a marketing leader who knows nothing about budgeting, Brand Water can work with you to create a budget that will help you manage your marketing spending. We can help you build a realistic budget that will prevent you from spending money you do not have, allocate appropriate resources to projects, and monitor performance.
You can call us at 813-777-9412 or email us at MATT@BRANDWATERMEDIA.COM. You can also send us a direct message by completing our contact form.
