The uniqueness and strength of your digital marketing strategy helps to achieve desired success for your business. Focus on integrating strategies with a high ROI to drive good profit. But this can be achieved by planning your budget effectively for digital marketing services including expenses and operational cost.
Businesses of all sizes, allocating a budget for digital marketing may seem like a real challenge. Many experts recommend spending around 5 to 15% of revenue on marketing, and around 10 to 50% of that should be for digital. To ease your concern, here are a few steps to help you easily narrow it down and determine a digital marketing budget for your business.
Steps to Manage Your Digital Marketing Budget
1. Define Your Goals
The objective of every digital marketing plan is to grow sales and engagement. In the short term, sales are increased by running campaigns including PPC. In addition, you need brand recognition if you want to grow strategically. The two major goals of your digital marketing campaigns include:
- Increase sales
- Increase brand awareness
This strategy will help to make you think about business priorities. Also, give an idea about how important digital marketing is and what budget can be assigned to digital marketing.
2. Choose Best Channels
This is really useful if you’ve already spent on digital marketing services earlier. Check old data to identify what is beneficial and what didn’t. Which strategies should you spend more and which needs to be avoided?
But if you’re going digital for first time, perform deep market research to keep an eye on the most promising digital marketing channels. Here are a few ways to do so:
1. Competitor Research
Check which are the most successful channels your competitors are considering.
2. Customer Research
Look for platforms where your customers engage. Do they prefer text or watch videos? Are they following any social media?
3. Keyword Research
What are the major keywords competitors are using to drive traffic? How much competition is present for these keywords? This is an important strategy to decide the keywords and how much you want to spend on such activities.
4. Define Marketing Activities Cost
Once you have shortlisted the channels by analyzing past campaigns, now is the time to add cost estimation. This will determine the number of channels you can afford. Having an effective presence on a channel is useful than having a limited presence on every channel.
Many times it has been observed that video is a great engagement channel but do you have the proper resources to create videos? It is better to send an engaging email than a weak video.
Next, you check about how much each activity will require investment to achieve the outcome. How many months of SEO is needed to increase traffic? How many PPC campaigns would be appropriate in a week?
5. Do Experimenting
Even after making a choice of the best marketing strategies, just keep experimenting with latest strategies. The reason is marketing strategies are dynamic, and you need to follow latest trends. Assign separate budget to try new marketing strategies.
Reach to a professional Digital marketing company to get proper information regarding the new trends. Study your competition to make better use of strategies.
Experimenting is all about failing and working on them to achieve success. However, without experimenting you’ll not know which ones are good. Only do this if you’re ready to lose some money.
Wrapping Up
Your digital marketing budget should be planned accordingly to serve your marketing needs. Assigning a budget to market is a tricky approach if you don’t have a proper plan on how to invest. Before assigning a budget, consider every stage on priority and determine which areas require a financial boost. You should also check the overall costs involved in the strategies, business goals, and the different marketing options present. Check your past results and see what has worked for your business and what failed. This is an important process when allocating money for your business marketing needs.
