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Marketing budget is critical to your success. Marketing is much more than just advertising and promotions, and your budget must cover the many areas of planning, pricing and distributing your product or service if you want to stay competitive and maximize your profits.
- Define your business strategy and marketing plan
Marketing budget is critical to your success. Marketing is much more than just advertising and promotions, and your budget must cover the many areas of planning, pricing and distributing your product or service if you want to stay competitive and maximize your profits. “You can’t make a marketing budget if you don’t know where your business is going,” Kazim says. “For marketing to work well, you need a solid business plan.”
You also need to create a marketing plan as part of your business strategy. It should spell out how marketing will help you achieve your business goals. This is where you define your brand, product positioning, target customers and their purchase journey, your competitive edge and competitors’ offerings.
- Determine your current marketing spend
Determine what you currently spend on marketing. This should include a detailed breakdown of everything you spend to promote your business, including:
- digital and traditional ads
- marketing personnel
- digital assets
- marketing management tools
- events and marketing collaterals
- sponsorships and other branding efforts
A lot of marketing spending is classified incorrectly in budgets.
It’s important to include plenty of detail.
For example, you should break down ad spending into subcategories, such as Google AdWords, Facebook ads, newspaper ads, billboards and event sponsorship placements.
- Measure the effectiveness of your spending
Track to gauge the effectiveness of your spending—for example, conversion rates, website traffic data or lead generation.
If you don’t track any metrics, now is the time to get going. “You can’t figure out your ROI if you don’t track these things.
The metrics you pick should be tied to your key performance indicators.
For example, if your goal is to promote your brand, you can monitor traffic to your website, bounce rates and conversion of website visitors into paying customers. If you’regoing to trade shows, you can track the number of orders or email leads you got at the show and compare those to the cost of the show.
- Optimize your efforts
Look at your current spending for each line item, and ask whether you need to change the amount to match your growth plans. A key consideration is each activity’s ROI.
For example, if your goal is to increase sales by 20%, you may need to upgrade your website, buy more ads or hire more marketing staff. Consider both quick wins and longer term tactics for achieving your business goals.
- Follow up and give guidance
Regularly monitor your metrics and actual spending—once a month or at least quarterly—and make any needed adjustments based on the effectiveness of various activities.
In Conclusion
The importance of a marketing budget is clear-it provides you with a sturdy plan that focuses on profitable campaigns that you can invest heavily into. You’re flying blind without this crucial information, and you might find yourself crashing into something big and heavy. But with a marketing budget in place, you can move forward confidently and guide your business to success.
How can Outlook Media help you in Structured Strategic planning to manage your marketing budget
Outlook Media helps you in increasing revenue, growing your brand awareness, increasing your competitive advantage, or launching new products and services. It’s important to note that these goals can change and thus, so can your strategic marketing plan. But no matter what goals you want to accomplish, you’ll need a plan to see it through.