Strategically plan your marketing budget

In this post we will talk about how to prepare your marketing budget, tips, advice, what we need to think and reflect on to plan the mkt budget.

We found different methods to strategically calculate the marketing budget:

• Based on the experience we have in the sector
• Revenue/profit percentage
• By assignment
• For competitive parity, we want to equate the budget with the competition
• ROI

We invite you to watch the webinar”How to prepare your 2023 Digital Marketing budget“to enrich your strategy.

‍Who makes the marketing budget?

Marketing has to be present, but vision and interactions with Management and Finance are also important.

In the first case, because of the business vision they have from management and, on the other hand, from finance, they have visibility of what can be spent on the company or not.

Now, we are going to the mess, in order to determine the marketing budget we have to start with research and knowledge of the numbers, expenses, revenues and expenses that we currently have.

What information do we have?

1. List and calculate your operating costs: everything that implies that the marketing department is up and running. Example: Web hosting, internal and external talent, our current Martech, what is the cost of all the tools we have contracted at that time.
   
   
2. Do we know:
3. billing per year?
4. the cost per lead?
5. the value of a customer?
6. the average ticket for each of the segments?
7. the results per channel?
8. the advertising investment of the past financial year?

What industry references do I have?

Ask us what the competition is doing and investigate it. We have many tools at hand that can give us this data.

For this reason, we share some tips and tools that can serve as a reference:

• Within the Google search engine you can enter website: tu_competidor.com to understand the frequency and type of articles that your competitors publish, how active our competitor is on the internet.
• BuzzSumo: to understand what type of articles your competitors are publishing.
• com/ads/library: We can analyze by keyword if our competitor is doing paid on Facebook.
• Similar website: through the URL we obtain information on how it is positioned, number of visits, bounce rate, etc. Which guides us on how digital this company is being.
• LinkedIn: within the company profile, in the publications section and by clicking on the advertisements section, we can analyze if the company is running paid campaigns.
• Competitor newsletter: with this we are aware of what our competition is doing in terms of email marketing.

With all this, we have references, insights, to know how much we want to invest in our digital channels.

We have talked about the past, now let's talk about the future.

For this we have to ask ourselves a series of questions:

• Where do you want to go?
• What is the company's long-term vision?
• Do we want to open new markets?
• How do we want to compete in the sector? To be the best, the fastest, the most economical?
• What is the position we want to have?
• How digitally mature are we within the sector?
• What type of target do we have? What are your expectations? What opportunities for improvement do we have compared to competitors?

Where can we invest our marketing budget strategically?

Here are some tips and ideas that can help you decide where to invest in your marketing strategy depending on what stage of the funnel they are in.

Awarenes:

• Optimize the web
• Work on SEO technical, On-page, Off-page, International SEO.
• Content marketing: beyond the blog, where our audience is is where we should be, podcast, TikTok, videos.
• Online Ads: Amazon Ads, Real Time Building, Audio Ads like Spotify.

Leads

• Social Ads: Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Snapchat, Pinterest Ads, Twitter Ads.
• Ads + CRM: Connect advertising investment with your business's CRM to analyze the efforts of your marketing and sales teams.
• Smart Lead magnets: download whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, infographics.
• UX-UI: your users are increasingly consuming better designs and user experiences in everything they do. Keep improving their experience on your website.
• Email marketing: Carry out a dynamic email strategy supported by marketing automation, dynamic data, email re-marketing and a/b testing.
• Remarketing: impacts a specific audience, at a specific time and channel.
• Personalized content: Get a more relevant website for your users to convert and build loyalty.

Leads + Recurring Client:

• Inbound Strategy: Avoid doing the above actions independently, defining a strategy around which they all converge on a platform where we can analyze the return, have wider visibility to make more timely decisions.
• Business Intelligence: You already use Google Analytics, now it's time to own your data, cross it with other sources and get more out of the data.
• Build your attribution model: the importance of knowing where your return comes from to make better decisions. In which channel are we going to invest the most and be able to justify it numerically because it is the one that brings us the most return.
• Optimize the conversion: A/B testing, multivariate testing, redirection testing, user testing, heatmaps.
• Optimize your CRM: They serve to bring order to your information and to be able to carry out better digital marketing actions.
• UX for your Customer Journey: Make use of a UX and Data team to conduct research on each phase of your customer journey.

Once we have defined where we want to invest our budget, we must bear in mind that it is very important to know how to adapt, if we are not getting returns, let's be critical enough to change it.

If we have our entire plan and strategy measured, we have the ability to follow up on all the actions we take and make decisions to change the course of the results.

How can we help you?

If you need more information don't hesitate to get in touch with us.