How to Plan Your Marketing Budget for the Quickest Return on Investment

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Marketing is the backbone of every organization. It is what keeps it going. To ensure that the marketing goes according to plan, you need to prepare the right marketing budget. It will allow you to get the quickest return on your investment.

Budgeting requires you to think about how much money you need to spend to acquire new customers and profit from it. The marketing budget will set out the money that will you should allocate to marketing activities.

Why Do You Need A Marketing Budget?

To plan your marketing budget right, you first need to know its importance. It will encourage you to get things done. The following reasons highlight why the marketing budget is vital.

1. Allow You to Financially Stay on Track

When developing a marketing strategy, you require a budget to stay on track financially. It allows you to keep track of all your costs. Thus, you have an easier time identifying where you are overspending and underspending.

If you fail to create a marketing budget, you will have difficulty managing your expenses and will more likely to overspend, which may cause the business to fail.

2. Enables You to Allocate Funds Where Needed

A marketing budget is a plan that dictates where to allocate the marketing funds. If you want to ensure that you spend your money in the right place, you require a marketing budget.

Once you know how much money is authorized to be spent, you will have an easier time putting the right amount of money in each marketing strategy. Therefore, you will be able to determine the amount of money each strategy requires to be successful.

3. Helps You Set Goals

When you have a budget in place, it allows you to set goals to ensure that your business is successful. With a well-defined budget, many things fall into place, including benchmarks. You can rely on these benchmarks for better managing your marketing efforts.

4. Assists with Long-Term Planning

By preparing a marketing budget, you get to invest your efforts in long-term planning. With a long-term perspective, you avoid spending on any extra marketing expenses. This long-term funding plan helps you create a more effective and consistent marketing strategy.

Plan Your Marketing Budget for Quick Returns on Your Investment

Plan Your Marketing Budget for Quick Returns on Your Investment

If you are struggling with your marketing budgeting and want to plan one for the fastest return, you need to do the following.

1. Set Clear Success Metrics

Most new digital marketers don’t know where to start when they sit down to create their marketing budget. Let us tell you that setting clear success metrics is an excellent place to start.

Ask yourself, what does success mean for your business? The more clearly you can define it, the better. Having a clear picture of your success metrics helps point you in the right direction.

Remember, all organizations are different. What might mean success to you could be something entirely different for another organization, which is why you need to give it great thought. Analyze the requirements of your stakeholders and how marketing can help meet those requirements.

Since the starting point is the most important, you have to get the success metrics right. There is more to the advertising metrics than just the advertising price range. It is vital to know what motivates each stakeholder group and the organization as a whole.

Marketing metrics are not just about return on investment. However, you should find the perfect balance between success and achievement. Common example of marketing success metrics include:

  • Weekly, Quarterly, or Monthly Site Visit – You can use this metric if your goal is to increase website traffic.
  • The Number of New Customers – You may use this metric if you want to measure your marketing efforts’ success by the number of new customers monthly.
  • The Number of Positive Reviews – You may use this metric if your goal is to maximize customer satisfaction.

2. Review Your Past Budgets

To plan a marketing budget that offers the quickest return on investment, you have to review your past budgets. It will provide you with an idea about what works and what does not. You can use the insights from previous budgets to prepare a marketing budget for the future.

There is a lot that can be learned from past budgets. They will inform you about market trends and your core competencies. Moreover, when you review past budgets, you get to build on your mistakes. Just like how important it is to determine your success, it is equally important to know about your failure. Through the review, you will gain valuable insights that you can use to prepare the best marketing budget.

If you have spent a lot of money on paid promotion, you need to think about whether it is worth the cost or not. Drop the least profitable marketing activities to prepare a marketing budget that offers the quickest return.

It is a good idea to consider new digital marketing techniques to expand your reach and boost leads. Look at Google Ads and how it could help you achieve your objectives. Think about the place where you fell short and if it is even required.

It is all about finding out the best way forward. Here are a few examples:

  • Your SEO marketing strategy is delivering results; therefore, you can continue using this strategy and allocate funds for it in the new marketing budget.
  • Your TVC campaign is failing to increase your sales as expected. Hence, you may not renew the TVC for the next budget and use those funds somewhere else.

3. Set SMART Targets

Next, you have to set SMART targets. The mnemonic stands for smart, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. When planning the marketing budget, it is easy to go overboard and include irrelevant or unrealistic goals.

To ensure that you set the right goals, you have to be SMART. Since the targets are set for either a quarter or an entire year, you have to plan accordingly. The marketing objectives and the budget both go hand-in-hand.

Focus on SMART targets to set objectives that you can trust. It is pointless to prepare a marketing budget without giving the targets some thought.

The shorter the objectives, the easier they are to measure. When you set shorter objectives, you get to establish a better picture for your organization. You need to set goals to move forward.

The goals you set will focus on either of the following.

  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Earning more subscribers
  • Increasing leads
  • Generating more revenue

Make sure that you are specific about the goals. Instead of setting a vague goal, such as increasing sales, you should consider setting specific and measurable goals. For instance:

  • Boost sales by 30 percent by the end of this quarter,
  • Increase consumer engagement by 15% in 2 months,
  • Increase the number of new customers by 5% this quarter, etc.

4. Pay Close Attention to the Sales Funnel

The Sales Funnel is critical for developing a successful marketing budget. When planning your marketing budget, you need to pay close attention to the sales funnel. It allows you to determine where you spend your money.

In the simplest of words, the sales funnel is a process that your audience goes through to become a customer. The sales funnel consists of four stages, as mentioned below.

  • Awareness: It is the initial stage where your audience identifies a problem for which they require a solution.
  • Consideration: During the consideration stage, the audience looks for available options.
  • Decision: Once the lead reaches towards making a decision, they narrow down their options searching for the ultimate solution.
  • Action: Finally, the lead heads to the action stage, where they select the business to purchase from and become a customer.

By understanding the sales funnel, you get to decide the amount of money you need to spend at each stage and the marketing activities required for converting leads.

The marketing strategy you choose will influence the marketing budget. Each strategy costs a different amount. Some of the strategies that offer the quickest return on investment include social media ads, pay-per-click ads, and video marketing.

5. Understand Your Market

A marketing budget that is not based on an understanding of your market is useless. You have to understand where your business fits in the market. Once you know where you stand in the market, you will prepare the right strategy and budget.

A great way to determine your market standing is by conducting a competitor analysis. It will allow you to keep an eye on your competition. There are plenty of competitor analysis tools that help you stay ahead of the competition.

6. Determine Your Marketing Strategy

Finally, you need to prepare a marketing strategy in line with the marketing budget. Get an idea about your strategy and the marketing activities that you plan on engaging in to grow. It is not necessary for you to be 100 percent sure. However, having an idea about the strategy will prove useful.

There are various marketing strategies that you can use, such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC advertising, social media marketing, social media advertising, and more. What you need to do is find the best promotional mix that suits your business needs, budget, and goals.

Plan Your Marketing Budget for the Quickest Return on Investment

Once you have gone over this post, you will know how to plan the marketing budget for a quick return on your marketing investment. Although it is important to get a speedy return, you also need to focus on the long-term if you want to continue generating revenue.

Author Bio:
Nouman provides ghostwriting and copywriting services. His educational background in the technical field and business studies helps him in tackling topics ranging from career and business productivity to web development and digital marketing. He occasionally writes articles for Dynamologic Solutions.

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