Your annual marketing budget should cover everything from essential marketing strategies, like your website and social media marketing, and also take in any innovative or new ideas that will take your brand, product or service forward.
So, how can you maximise your marketing budget to deliver the optimum ROI?
In today’s fast-paced world, marketing trends and strategies change rapidly, especially in the digital marketing space! It’s crucial to adjust your budget at the start of each year and at regular intervals throughout the following months.
The key to building an effective marketing budget is:
- understanding new and exciting trends
- seeing the bigger picture of your business operations
- researching the marketplace and broader societal shifts
- using the right tools that can help you meet your objectives.
Here are a few things to consider when planning out your marketing budget:
- Plan – Plan – Plan! Like the old saying: Fail to Plan, Plan to fail! So plan out a clear path for your marketing budget
- Make sure you have done as much research on each aspect of your Plan
- Your marketing budget should always be seen as an investment, NOT an expense; every penny spent on marketing needs to give a return
- Measure the results, this will help you make powerful improvements to your on-going Plan
1. Start by setting the right goals
Firstly, make sure you clearly understand your marketing goals for the year. Determine measurable, achievable goals and outline the path you need to take to realise them. This will help you determine how much money to invest in each aspect of your budget.
Remember the SMART acronym for setting goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
If you’re not sure where to start, here are some good measurements to pursue initially:
- Know and plan to increase your website’s conversion rate
- Boosting the number of unique monthly visitors to your website
- Build up your email subscriber list
- Improve your SEO rankings
2. Make your brand, the digital customer experience
There’s no time like the present to put your digital customer experience at the top of your marketing plan.
Take your customer on a journey. Create a Story that engages your customers to believe in your brand and make their own informed decisions.
The more engaging your Story, the more new and existing customers will keep flooding back, so turn them all into life long fans!
3. Choose tech that makes your goals achievable
Make sure your tech and systems support your goals and strategies and replace them if they don’t fit your Plan.
No single marketing technology will make your marketing budget go further, but you can always get it to work harder.
Take time to consider your options when it comes to adopting or keeping a CRM platform. Sometimes just tweaking what you have can be better than a full out change.
You may well begin to consider using a digital experience platform instead, but always be mindful of the resources needed for successful implementation.
4. Your website is your shop window, so invest in it
Your website is one of the most important components of your marketing strategy, and it is also something that you will own outright. All of the content on your website, digital assets, copy, white papers and even the email list that you curate through your website is yours, so get using it.
It’s widely recommended that your website should be updated every two years. This keeps the content and your brand fresh and consistent with your customers’ experience. It also helps with good SEO practices, putting your website in front of potential customers.
There are always great opportunities to those businesses who keep on top of the marketing plans, who are willing to adapt to new marketing media streams, who maximise their marketing budgets, and above all, have a forward thinking attitude to their marketing.
So where will you start? Do you need help with where to begin? 418 has a wealth of knowledge in developing effective marketing plans and strategies for businesses of all sizes.
Get in touch!
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