How to Plan a Digital Marketing Budget for Your Business

Marketing and promotion might seem to be similar, but they are really different. People have been adopting a wide number of different ways to promote their products or items across their intended markets. During the traditional old days, it used to be posters, print, TV or radio commercials, etc.

But these days, all marketing and promotions are done via the internet. Thanks to all the smart devices that are available these days, which will help you to find what is going on around. Normal businesses, these days, are implementing a number of new technologies and methodologies to make their digital efforts pay off. Your aim is to reach where your audiences are rather than focusing everywhere else.

Certain reports state that more than 90% of organizations have found a way to increase their digital marketing budget over the years. By next year, all these marketers are expecting some increase in their budget.

Allocating your marketing budget might not be an easy task. Make sure that your efforts in digital marketing are aligned across the brand and its goals, and not anything else.

Are you planning to increase your budget? So what or where should you be investing to make your budget effective? Still, lack ideas? We can help you.

Below are some tips to help you plan a digital marketing budget:

What Are My Goals?

You need to have a clear goal or goals when you are planning on your digital marketing budget. Let us not end up allocating budget for unnecessary things. Also, do not forget that we are not here for a long-term solution and not experimenting with something that might work instead of looking for what will surely work.

Set your aim in such a way that by the end of it, you are accomplishing and getting what you wanted. This could be either a single outcome or short-term goals, based on your business’ requirements.

Be clear of what you want to achieve – regardless of whether it is to boost your brand’s visibility or whether you want to create engagement or increase the revenue or the number of customers. Each of your business goals is important – so where you start is important. Make sure you implement ideas that will help you to achieve your digital marketing goals, which are directly aligned to your business goals.

Paid Advertising

Let us start thinking about where you would allocate your budget for digital marketing strategies. So think of investing in something like paid advertising. Start thinking in terms of how much your overall budget is or how much you’d be ready to spend! Next, it is important to think of what are the factors that would influence your target audiences. Based on these factors, split your budget between Google Adwords and social media advertisements.

Social media ads mainly target social media networking sites, such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and anywhere where your audience is active. With Google Adwords ads, you can include search ads that will drive your customers’ attention or remarketing ads that will bless their minds with your brand’s name. This is important as they look for solutions to their queries.

Email Marketing

Email marketing never goes out of place in influencing consumers’ minds. You can always think of using email marketing as one of those important aspects that would keep moving leads to your sales funnel. (With the help of email automation tools you can create prospect lists, verify email addresses to maintain the high reputation of your email account by improving the delivery rate of your campaigns.)

Make sure you are sending accurate follow-up emails, which will introduce consistency rather than popping out of the blue and sending an email. A number of email marketing strategies can be implemented. But is important to introduce the one that actually works. Email marketing would need you to invest some budget.

A number of factors, such as the size of your business and its target customers, etc. you should be able to decide how much you can allocate for your email strategy in the digital marketing budget.

How do you Allocate Your Budget?

Yes, it is important to decide how and where you would allocate your budget. You have set your goals based on your ideas on which of these strategies would work, eliminating the ones that do not. Your mantra should be to attain success without loss of money.

When you decide where you would allocate your money, it is easy to cut out on things that might not add value to your strategies. Think of social media in digital marketing – it does not cost anything for you to create an account on social media or even to post on it. But when you have researched and found that audiences for your niche are active across social media networking sites, such as Instagram, then it is important to give a social media budget a boost.

So think of the possibilities that your social media account can bring? If with a few resources invested in this medium, it has brought you so much of profit, then with continuous investment, think of how effective it could get.

Also, sometimes, it happens that a particular social media network begins to become weak while another one becomes strong. In that case, you would have to plan to invest your social media budget on the one that is doing better than the others. So rather than focusing on something that doesn’t get you results, plan on something that would bring you results. This means you have to constantly keep researching what people want.

How do you Define Your Goals?

Once you have your goals defined and laid out, next is thinking about the digital marketing strategies and where you would implement these. You can think of the resources you can set aside to fulfill these goals. Two of the main resources that help to accomplish your digital marketing goals include software and manpower.

Plan your budget accordingly such that you can have these accommodated in your strategy. Think of it in terms of whether you want to allocate dedicated manpower or technology for each process. For instance, in case you would like to dedicate staff or technology for social media marketing, think of how many staff members you would be needing to handle social media.

If it is one, you would need lesser investment, but if it is a team, you would need more. In case you want the tool to be really efficient – then you would need to spend a lot of money on it.

And when it comes to allocating a dedicated resource, it would be more like creating a calendar and then ensuring that someone handles the posts on time. Also, you can always apply in-depth analytics tools to make sure that your staff is doing their job right while also finding out what works and what does not.

Planning Your Content

You would always need to focus on creating content. This is one of the most important aspects of any digital marketing strategies. How are you going to do that?

Based on your business, its needs and goals, it is important to decide the type of content that you create. Create articles and blog posts that are in-depth, and make sure these become an important part of the marketing goals. These should be in line with service-related industries and here, you would find that consumers are looking for detailed information before they arrive at a decision. Here, your budget should be allocated for writing experts who will help you to write related content.

Some times, rather than just text content, certain businesses might benefit from video content as well. Though content is involved, it is a different side of the content spectrum that would need a variety of skill sets different from that of text content. So you would need to think of budget in terms of recording equipment, editing equipment, writers and even presenters in case you are seeking external agencies or professionals’ help to accomplish this.

Where Are You Going to Publish this Content?

As we already discussed, social media, content and various other factors need to be taken into consideration before you finally decide where you would allocate your budget. So now, it is time to decide where you would market your business: the platform is as important as any other aspect of your business.

Based on your business, consumer or target audience and the market that you focus on the platform where you will publish your content can be decided. So if you are planning for a B2B enterprise, your primary audiences would belong to management level, including CFOs or CTOs. Your content would be centered more for consumption in office – accessed may be using a desktop or laptop device. This could be content that would appear across articles or even on websites.

In case if your business is more of retail or is public-sector focused, then the content that you develop should be something that resonates with the people who would be accessing these through handy devices, such as phones or tablets.

It could also mean that your content would be in the form of maybe videos or photos, which would be posted on social media. This would reflect on your budget as well.

Search Engine Optimization gets a Fair Share

Your search engine optimization (SEO) gets a fair share of the digital marketing budget. It is important to make sure that your website is ready to attract consumers. Your content should be strong and compelling enough to attract search engines and people to your website. When you invest resources (budget and time) on SEO, there are all chances that your words and voice would reach the right customers at some point in time. So it is also important to have an effective SEO strategy for your business.

Every industry has different needs. What works for one might not work for another. So it is important to do your research well before you start allocating budget for your digital marketing plans.

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