When you are looking for a good marketing strategy, then you'll need to make sure that you have the budget to back it up.
Without the right amount of money, you might not be able to create that high-quality content for your website or be able to boost your Facebook posts to a wider audience.
There is also a marked difference between budgeting for small companies and budgeting for big companies.
If you are making a budget for a smaller company, one of the major things you'll want to avoid is making a loss, as you'll need as much of your budget as possible during those early few days.
So where can you find the right budgeting templates for your business? How can you budget for your small business before upscaling it as the whole thing grows?
Well, we have all the tools that you need to get started, so you won't be subject to overspending or underfunding.
Why Should I Spend Money On Marketing?
There are plenty of reasons you should spend money on marketing. Firstly, when it comes to selling your business over half of the advertising is done digitally.
This is why a lot of companies dedicate over half of their budget to social media, websites, and emailing lists.
Marketing is one of the most important methods of getting your product out there. Here are some of the things that your marketing budget will cover:
· Advertising – this could be digital banner ads or website designs.
· Personnel – this could be a dedicated social media team or simply just paying one person to take charge of all the social media output.
· Content creation – this is the stuff that you will fill your website and social media with, whether it is copy, Tweets, or even YouTube content.
This is just a brief breakdown of the costs that you'll be incurring.
Now we'll go slightly more in-depth, looking at specific budget templates and what they are designed to pay for.
With digital media, you'll need to make sure that you have processes to create and maintain your marketing campaigns and to process all the data that you'll be receiving on a regular basis.
There are many different things that your software will have to process, here is a list of some of the more important ones:
· Customer relationship management (CRM) – this will help you to close deals with your customers and gather information to create leads.
· Online advertising – As mentioned above, this covers everything from banner ads to boosted Facebook posts.
· Social media – This could be paying for boosted posts on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
· Content creation and design – Whether it is copy, product descriptions, or even YouTube tutorials based on your company's specific niche, you might need to pay for personnel to write this for you.
· Event marketing – Events are a great way to gather industry professionals in your field and allow you the opportunity to network.
· Lead capture and lead generation – This will help you to increase the conversion rate of website visitors into leads. You can get some of these tools for free, although some you have to pay for.
· Marketing automation – This will automate some tasks so that you don't have to pay a human to do them. You can have automated Facebook posts, ad campaigns, and social media marketing.
· Data reporting and analytics – These reports are crucial for showing how your current marketing strategies are working. This includes traffic reports on visitors to your website.
· Digital asset management – This is the process of storing all of your digital assets, either through a cloud storage device or through a paid third-party subscription service.
· Team collaboration – It will be important that your marketing team is able to share files, communicate with each other quickly and effectively, and organize their data.
As you can see, the list of these costs is pretty extensive, which is why you'll need to allot quite a lot of your budget to it.
Sometimes you'll have to outsource some of the excess workloads of your marketing to a third-party company.
This might be on a short- or long-term basis. This is why you might want to allocate money to a freelancer.
Freelancers can be hired at an hourly rate, so make sure you account for this in the budget.
Some freelancers also have specialized skills that you might not be able to find in-house, so you might think it is worth the extra charge.
If you are looking to hire full-time employees for your marketing team, then you'll also have to figure out exactly how much you are paying them annually.
You'll need to make sure that you account for the skills they are providing the team as well as the technology that they will be using.
You'll also have to factor in their employee benefits and all of their onboarding needs.
This is one of the most important factors in getting your business out there.
This will include both digital and physical ads, as some of the best companies usually use a combination of the two.
Digital ads can include search engine adverts, social media adverts, and sponsored content.
If you are not advertising your business digitally on the internet, then you might as well give up, as this accounts for over 95% of all business revenue.
Just because it is a small paragraph on your social media account, doesn't mean there hasn't been a lot of time and effort put into creating it.
The same goes for photos and videos, which also require time, personnel, funds and equipment to make.
You should make sure there is enough in your budget to account for all of this.
How Best To Manage Your Budget
There is a general rule when it comes to a marketing budget that you want to allocate the most amount of money to marketing strategies that you know work.
Here is how we like to break down these percentages:
· 70% of your funds should be dedicated to strategies that you know work.
· 20% of your funds should be allocated to marketing strategies that you haven't tried before that are aimed at helping you grow your business.
· 10% of your funds should be dedicated to experimental marketing strategies.
You can also allocate these funds by the channel you are intending to spend them on. This is an example channel breakdown that will help you with money allocation:
· Social marketing – 11.3%
· Digital Advertising – 11.2%
· Search Engine Optimization – 10.5%
· Website – 10.1%
· Offline Advertising – 9.9%
· Mobile Marketing – 9.7%
· Paid Search – 9.7%
· E-mail Marketing – 9.7%
· Partner Channel – 9.4%
· Event Marketing – 8.4%
As you can see, digital advertising tops the charts, as this is one of the more important aspects of getting your business out there.
You should think about the journey of your customer and how you can make that more streamlined.
We hope that our guide to your marketing budget has helped you to figure out how you can best invest your money so that your business will reach more customers and grow exponentially.
You should make sure that you allocate a lot of your budget to digital marketing, as this is how most businesses operate these days.
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