How To Create A Digital Marketing Budget That’s Effective

As time goes, there are even more possibilities for new customers, new sales goals, new opportunities to boost, and possibly expand your business.

The excitement and optimism that comes with such plans will be short-lived if your marketing budget is not well defined from the start, and to reflect apparent realities.

For most brands, their marketing budget is mainly dependent on their ROI (return on investment) on money spent on marketing in the previous year, and how much they are willing to spend on marketing in the coming year, with the ultimate goal of making more gains.

However digital marketing budget is a projection of cost required to promote your business product or services using digital tools and platforms. To adequately use digital platforms as a medium of optimizing sales, you need to factor in more things when setting, planning, and executing your budget.

 Let us look at critical ways of planning and implementing a digital marketing budget plan.

1. Set Realistic Business Goals

Before embarking on plans towards creating a digital marketing budget, having an overall business goal is absolutely necessary. You need to start asking yourself questions.

What do you want to achieve as a business? How soon do you want to achieve them? Is it on the short term or long-term?

After drawing out these business goals, identifying those that can be actualized using digital marketing strategies, becomes the next best thing to do; followed closely by the answer to the question of how much can be used to achieve your outlined goals.

2. Create Your Marketing Strategy

Creating a detailed marketing strategy is essential to achieving any marketing goal. Click To Tweet

If you want to meet a target of NGN500,000 at a certain period, your strategy needs to show how you will do it and through what channels you will do it. Getting this stage right isn’t easy if you don’t have a marketing professional on your team.

So, ensure that you have one. If you don’t, contact a digital marketing company to build a detailed marketing strategy for you as well as implement such strategies. Also, read our post on building a marketing strategy for your business.

3. Set Your Marketing Budget

Having determined what your goals and objectives are as a company, and the digital marketing switch to put on in making these goals a reality, you will need to roll out a marketing budget that will create the means for the development of a detailed marketing plan that supports the strategies that will lead to your achieving your goals.

You can choose from three options:

a. Small Plan:

This is ideal for companies that are looking at maintaining their market position, but do not have ambitious growth goals. Meaning, you want to stay where you are and you’re comfortable with that. This, as a small plan, would only work in low-competitive industries, else your budgeting plan might not help you retain your position.

b. Target Plan:

This is ideal for companies looking to increase their market share and have reasonable growth goals (10 – 15% annual growth).

c.  Expanded Plan:

This option is ideal for companies with ambitious plans to grow and increase their market share (20% or more annual growth).

Any of the above plans are great, depending on what you want as a company.

 4. Allocate Your Marketing Budget

At this point, your company must be active on different digital marketing platforms. Now you can get into the details of developing a tactical plan to convert your marketing goals into reality. You would have to allocate the digital marketing budget into marketing areas that will be essential towards your goals such as:

• Social media
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Paid advertising
• Content and email marketing
• Lead conversion
• Sales funnels
• Inbound marketing
• Web design

Determine how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to each aspect of your digital marketing activity. Your digital marketing strategy will help you know what areas should have a higher allocation and what should have lower.

5. Take Actions With Flexibility

After you have set out a plan that is in line with your goals, you need to act on it as soon as possible, with due diligence. As you work on it, it is important to note that to ensure a successful implementation of your plan, you have to be flexible.

Do not be stubborn about implementing your budget. Do not be stiff-necked in the course of your budget implementation. Opportunities might come up that will require you to increase your budget to cover for them. You might also get opportunities that help you spend way less than you planned.

There are no guarantees to these things. If your plans are not meeting expectations, do a review, take a break, and study why it is not working.

What Next

Get started on your marketing budget plan right away. It’s never too late to plan for business growth. If you are having issues with planning and/or implementing your budget or strategies to achieving your goals, get in touch with us and we can help you get on the right path.