Marketing is a crucial part of any business. Without effective marketing, your odds of drawing new customers to your business are slim. While word of mouth can take you a certain distance, effective marketing in 2021 requires careful planning in a few different areas. The most crucial of these areas is budgeting.
Small businesses are often loath to invest money in marketing strategies, but the reality is that these strategies to spin and win real money pay off in the long term. At the same time, many business owners don’t know how to go about establishing effective marketing budget control. We’re going to look at five steps you can follow to make the process as straightforward and effective as possible.
Analyse Your Current Results
Before putting your marketing budget business plan together, you need to assess how your previous marketing budget, and previous strategies, played out. There’s much more to effective marketing than just throwing money at the problems, but at the same time, an insufficient budget will negatively affect your marketing. Check your previous marketing budget example, and consider whether the amount of money you allocated was appropriate. You can do this by comparing your outgoings to how much business was brought in through marketing campaigns. By weighing up the two sides, you can get a better understanding of your marketing budget needs, and plan your next budget accordingly.
Devise Your Marketing Strategy
As we’ve already mentioned, thanks to the internet, you can actually manage to do a lot of modern marketing without relying on outside professionals. Probably you will need someone to manage your website, posting new content and keeping everything up to date. But when it comes to creating marketing copy, or writing regular blog posts, there’s a good chance you can manage these things yourself. The areas where marketing investment has the real potential to pay off comes in analysing data. By either investing in an analysis tool, or hiring an analyst, your marketing can really benefit. Effective analysis lets you craft successful marketing campaigns based on previous successes, giving you the best opportunities to pull in new customers.
Start Defining Your Marketing Budget
Now that you’ve started building up your marketing strategy plan, you can start thinking about exactly how much you’d like to allocate to your marketing budget. There are a few different schools of thought on what percentage of a budget to allocate to marketing. Up to three percent is seen as maintaining. This means that you’ll be able to keep things ticking over, but you won’t see a particularly impressive rate of new conversions.
Up to five percent is seen as a way of gradually growing your customer base with outreach campaigns. It’s also a good amount to spend if you want to ensure that you hold on to current customers. Six percent or more is for a company that wants to quickly expand and bring in lots of new customers. This is worth considering if you’ve got steady profits, and feel like there’s sufficient money to grow your company quickly. One of the three above marketing budget management options is probably within your reach.
Distribute Your Marketing Budget
Now comes the time for deciding exactly how you want your marketing budget for small businesses to be spent. There are plenty of different things to take into account, all very much dependent on the kind of business you run. For instance, you may want to spend money on events if you run something like a café or restaurant, as you’ll be equipped to prepare for them. On the other hand, if you don’t run a brick-and-mortar business, these kinds of outgoings will be considerably less useful for you. Online marketing, as we’ve already mentioned, is something that you can often do yourself.
At the same time, an effective online presence could be something that you’d rather have someone else do for you. There’s a huge range of different marketing strategies out there, and the important thing at this stage is that you decide which ones are most useful to your business.
Define Your Marketing Plan
Now is the moment to actually define your marketing plan. Without clear definition, you and your employees will struggle to carry out your marketing budget goals. It’ll also be unclear exactly what gains you receive as time goes on. A written marketing plan is a good way of defining your goals, and cementing the budgetary choices that you’ve made. Define what you plan to do, and define the results you expect to see. Set alongside the outgoings that you’re planning on making, this kind of plan can keep everyone in the loop as your marketing progresses.
Conclusion
Marketing budget importance can be daunting. But as we’ve seen, it doesn’t need to be. With the correct planning, and careful judgement, any business owner can put together an effective marketing budget, alongside a marketing plan that can deliver results. The above steps are everything you need to create a great marketing budget that will benefit your business.
Author’s Bio
Scott Carrion is a freelance writer and analyst focusing on business and marketing. His Master’s degree in Business research from Curtis L. Carlson School of Management has given him a broad base from which to approach many topics. He works closely with B2B and B2C companies providing useful and engaging content that can convert viewers into customers.
