Tag: marketing budget

When you’ve been in digital marketing as long as I have, you tend to notice when brands are making mistakes with their strategy. A lot of brands believe they must be using all available marketing channels to be successful, but in doing so, find they don’t have the budget to properly manage and execute campaigns at that scale. As a result, they’re simply stretched too thin, and running poor to mediocre at best campaigns on a wide scale, when they’d be far better served running absolutely stellar campaigns on fewer channels.

Not all channels are relevant to all brand audiences, and not all channels will support your marketing objectives. That’s why it’s important to continuously revisit your marketing goals, and keep a close eye on data to see how well you’re achieving those goals. It means developing multiple strategies to accomplish goals, and remaining fluid and flexible enough to make changes based on the data you’re seeing, so you can improve your ROI.

A large part of developing any digital marketing strategy for any goal is knowing where and how you invest your money. While I obviously can’t give you a cut and dry approach that works every time for everyone, I hope to guide you so you can be smarter with your money – especially if it’s limited – to help you earn more profit to reinvest back into your business and fuel growth.

 

Assess Your Target Audience and Goals

Your demographics will determine the methods you’ll use to reach your audience. For example, if you’re trying to target an audience of younger people, you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on popup ads on various websites, for the simple fact that the majority of your audience will be using ad blockers.At the same time, if you’re targeting an older audience, certain social channels like Snapchat won’t be as effective – and an audience of men means Pinterest isn’t a good choice, either. If you’re spending time and money on places where your audience can’t be found in volume, then you’re doing it wrong.

Now, think about your goals – because this won’t necessarily affect the total spend, but it may mean you spend more in certain places than others.

Common digital marketing goals typically fall into one of two categories:

• Increasing brand awareness – growing your social media following, increasing social engagement, getting more content views, shares, or downloads
• Increasing sales – higher conversions for first-time buyers, increasing averageorder value (AOV), increasing customer retention percentage

 

Determine the Channels to Best Reach That Audience

Email marketing is a great channel for most audiences – because everyone uses email. It is, however, a hard one to break into.

You want to invest in social media, but there are countless channels to be involved in – and depending on your demographics, certain channels are better ignored.

 

Key Areas to Invest In

• Email Marketing: For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38. One study shows people are twice as likely to sign up for your email list than they are to interact with you on Facebook.
• Content Marketing: This will likely take up the majority of your digital marketing budget, and can be hard to allocated based on the approach you choose. You’ll need money to pay content creators for the creation of content – whether it’s written, images, or video. You’ll need money to pay for the tools you use to make it easier, and social media and data experts to help you push the content. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, but generates 3x the leads.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM): You’ll need to grow your social presence, which means spending time creating content specifically for your social channels and running ads on Facebook and other platforms.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): People can’t see your content if they can’t find it. Investing in SEO can help you bring in organic traffic from searchers looking for what you have to offer.

If you have past campaigns to analyze, take the time to learn from the data. How much money did you spend in each of these areas? What was your return on investment? Did you, or did you not reach your goals? How close were you to achieving the goal? How far did you exceed your goal? Have you sustained that follower growth or lost some since the conclusion of the campaign? This information will help you as you determine what to allocate where for the next round of campaigns.

 

How Much Money Do You Have?

It’s up to you how much money to dedicate to your total marketing budget. For bootstrapped and small businesses, this can be a meager sum compared to medium businesses and especially enterprises. But, no matter the amount, here’s a good guideline to follow: spend anywhere between five and 15% of your total revenue. As your revenue grows, you can invest more back into the business to keep the momentum going.

Notice I said total marketing budget. You’ll want to reserve a portion of that budget for conventional marketing methods, so your digital marketing budget is only part of it. Of course, because of how popular and relatively affordable it is compared to non-digital options, you’ll want to spend the bulk of that budget digitally. Generally speaking, spend up to half of that budget on total digital marketing – breaking it down into smaller segments over those four key areas.

 

What You Should Spend and Where You Should Spend It

Every business is different, so instead of assigning hard numbers for everyone to follow, if you don’t know exactly what you need, I recommend using the 70/20/10 rule. 70% of your budget goes to things you already know are effective. 20% of your budget goes to experimentation, mostly on what you’re confident is a safe bet. While you’re not completely sure the investments will pay off, it’s reasonable to believe they are a good option. Use the remaining 10% of your budget to do whatever you want. Have a crazy idea that could result in a high ROI, but could also bomb? This is where you allocate the funds to give it a try and see what happens. Play around with the numbers until you find what works best for you, using this as your starting guideline.

 

What Tools Will You Need?

Another important part of budgeting lies in making sure you have the funds for the tools you need to make your job easier. That’s not to say you can’t use free versions of tools that come with free forever plans, but trying to do everything manually will cost you time – and we all know time is money.

At the least, I recommend using a social media management platform, but you’ll also need something for email marketing to handle your lists, autoresponders, and so on. You may also want to invest in other automation tools, or customer relationship management platforms, depending on your needs and what you’re already using. The good thing is, there are highly effective tools available at various price points so you can find something that works for your budget.

 

Digital Marketing is Ongoing

Until your business either changes hands or shuts its doors and you don’t have to worry about it anymore, everything will remain an ongoing process. Take the time to review your budget and progress every month, if not more often. Do a more comprehensive review annually. Your budget should be allocated to areas that will make the biggest impact, and those areas may change as your business grows.

No matter what kind of business you’re running, it’s essential that you have a marketing strategy that’s expansive, practical and effective.

Small business owners have some tough decisions to make here. If they’re new to the world of digital media marketing, creating a marketing strategy from scratch can be an intimidating task. With so many options and conflicting information available, it can hard for business owners to decide where to start.

Even if they manage to decide on where to start, actually implementing those systems properly and in conjunction with the other aspects of a successful marketing strategy is no easy feat. Marketing strategies are tough, and marketing budgets are one of the easiest places to get tripped up.

But here’s some good news. If you’re able to decide what your marketing strategy is going to be made up of and you manage to create a reasonable marketing budget, you’ll be that much closer to executing a successful marketing strategy.

For the sake of clarity and brevity, we’ll only be breaking down a balanced marketing strategy, that tackles some of the major sectors that small business owners should focus on when marketing in the world of digital media. Business owners can choose to increase or decrease the amount of attention paid to a particular sector, but this is a great guideline for anyone just getting started.

 

Research

Before you start thinking about what you should or shouldn’t be investing time/money into, it’s important that you take the time to think about who this strategy is for. The most effective marketing strategies ever made were built from the ground up with a particular audience in mind. So before you spend a dime on anything marketing related, clear up time in your schedule to build buyer personas.

Remember that ambiguity is not your friend here. You want to understand as much as you can about the consumers you hope to turn into customers. How old are they? How much do they earn annually? Where else do they shop? It’s unlikely that you’ll only have one type of ideal customer, so feel free to come up with 3-4 buyer personas if you need to.

Where are you going to get this information from exactly? Fortunately, you’re not the first business owner to want a better understanding of their audience. There are a variety of tools already in existence that help you conduct research on your audience. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have business tools, which are free analytics services that provide you with everything from the general geographic location of your followers to their page likes. They even let you know which times users are most active, allowing you to revolve your marketing efforts around their schedule.

Oh, and the best part? This is all free.

 

Metrics

You’re almost ready to put that marketing strategy into action, but first we need to set up a way for you to ‘keep score’. The world’s best marketing strategy is nothing without feedback. If you’re serious about building an effective marketing strategy, you’ll need to keep track of the metrics associated with it.

To be fair, your social media platforms will likely have some of this built-in already. Still, with the right tools at your disposal, you’ll have a much clearer image of what’s happening within your marketing strategy.

Consider a tool like Iconosquare for in-depth data. If you’re trying to keep track of Instagram analytics, nothing’s going to be better. Aside from having access to advanced analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of effective Instagram marketing tactics. For $9/month, that’s not a bad deal.

Metrics might seem like the least exciting aspect of this process, but rest assured that nothing is more exciting than watching your marketing efforts succeed because of concrete data.

 

Social Media Management

Now, we need to incorporate social media managers into the mix. If you’re new to this process, they can make a massive difference when it comes to executing a marketing strategy well. Not only do they save small business owners plenty of time, they can also keep your marketing efforts consistent, which is something that’s absolutely worth investing in.

Of course, all you’ll be investing is time, most likely. Tools like Buffer let you manage a single social media account per platform for free. If you’re wondering exactly why you’d need a social media manager, then consider for a moment the incredible commitment it takes to actually create, execute and stick to a long-term marketing strategy.

Posting multiple times every day, ensuring that a portion of it is fresh content, is a challenge for just about any business owner, experienced or otherwise. Take our advice: the more help you can get, the better. Especially if it’s free.

 

Content

Finally, we get to the good stuff. The content you choose to promote via your marketing strategy will shape public perception of your business for years to come. Fortunately, you’ll have plenty of options to choose from. Remember that there are no right or wrong experiments, only the data is going to know what worked and what didn’t, at the end of the day. Feel free to try new things (within reason), and check the metrics to see whether or not your audience responded to it.

Visually, there’s plenty that your business can do. Platforms like Snapchat and Instagram have made stories popular, which is great news for a small business with a modest marketing budget. Instead of worrying about appearing as professional as possible, you can embrace the informal nature of stories and create authentic content for your audience.

Of course, that’s just one possible strategy. You could make short videos on Instagram, create infographics for Facebook, link to blog posts on Twitter. There are only two limits here: your imagination and what the data says about each post’s performance.

 

Advertising

The most awe-inspiring content won’t do anything for your business if it isn’t being consumed. Creating great content is important, but getting that content in front of people on a consistent basis is just as important.

If you’re wondering whether or not ‘guess-and-check’ is a theme for marketing strategies, the answer is yes. Advertising is no exception. There are few definitive places that most small business owners should be investing in paid ads. Facebook and Instagram ads have shown strong ROI, and until that changes, a good portion of your budget should be dedicated to those two.

Where does the guess-and-check component come in? Well, your audience might be more opening to conversions on Facebook than Instagram (or vice versa). The key is to test for a set amount of time, consider the data you collect and make a decision based on that afterward.

Your business marketing budget doesn’t have to be insanely complex or pricey. You could do all of this with less than $100 dollars. All it takes is thoughtful execution and dedication to minor improvements over time.