Managing a digital marketing budget involves careful planning, tracking, and optimization. Here are steps to effectively manage it:
- Allocate Budget Wisely:
Distribute your budget across different digital channels based on your target audience and goals. Common channels include:
- PPC Advertising: Allocate funds for platforms like Google Ads, Bing Ads, or social media ads.
- Content Marketing: Invest in creating quality content for blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.
- Social Media: Set aside a portion for organic and paid social media marketing.
- SEO: Allocate for optimizing website content and improving search rankings.
- Email Marketing: Budget for email campaigns and automation tools.
- Settle on your marketing goals
Collectively speaking, all aspects of your ongoing marketing strategy should be focused on either boosting revenue through sales or developing your sales funnel. However, every business will naturally have its own goals in mind, so it’s important to fully understand yours before you just dive in.
Work with your team to set both long-term and short-term goals. It’s also important to determine how you’ll assess your progress along the way, so be sure to set your key performance indicators right out of the gate, as well.
- Understand our target market
Before you can decide which types of marketing should receive priority when setting your marketing budget, you need intimate knowledge of who you’re marketing to. Brainstorming a set of buyer personas can help you get into your target audience’s collective heads and develop a more effective strategy.
Start the process of developing new buyer personas by interviewing not only your current customers but also other members of your target demographics. Tools like Google Analytics can help you figure out which demographics your existing visitors belong to.
- Settle on your marketing channels
Once you know where your ideal customers tend to go for information on products and services like yours, you’ll have a better idea of which marketing channels to focus on moving forward. Examples include:
- Outbound marketing: Outbound tactics are great for spreading your brand’s message to broad sections of your target audience. Examples include TV spots, display ads, and cold email outreach.
- Inbound marketing:Inbound tactics help you connect with consumers who are already interested in products you sell or topics your brand covers. Examples include blog posts, ebooks, SEO content, and video marketing content.
- Digital marketing:Digital marketing covers essentials like social media marketing, opt-in email marketing, content marketing, SEO, and PPC ads.
- Brand-building: This category is focused on goals like building brand awareness and frequently overlaps or is combined with a company’s digital marketing efforts.
Decide how important each channel will ultimately be to your ongoing marketing campaign based on what you know about your audience. Then consider different strategies for dispersing your budget among them. Evaluate your progress often and make changes accordingly.
Many businesses choose the 10-percent-of-revenue option we touched on earlier. However, you can also base your budget on how much your competition might be spending or on specific goals you’re pursuing at the time. You can also adopt a top-down approach that leaves the final figures up to management to reevaluate annually or quarterly.
Remember, effective budget management requires a balance between flexibility and strategic planning to adapt to changes in the digital landscape while staying aligned with your marketing goals.