Developing a Digital Marketing Budget
Developing a comprehensive digital marketing budget will ensure that you allocate resources efficiently and effectively across your business, and will help you to maximise the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts.
In this brief blog, we will talk you through the process of developing a sensible digital marketing budget that aligns with your business objectives.
Define your marketing goals
The first thing you should do is to define your Marketing Goals.
These goals should align with your overall business objectives and be specific, measurable and achievable.
They should focus on increasing website visits, generating leads, boosting sales or improving brand awareness.
You should analyse past performance for any campaigns you have run in the past.
You should review historical data and look at what has worked and what hasn’t worked for you in the past.
Analysing data from previous campaigns to identify successful strategies and areas for improvement moving forward.
The performance indicated that you should review include cost per acquisition, return on outspend, conversion rates, click rates, and customer lifetime value.
These figures will help you to make informed decisions about where to invest your budget for maximum impact.
Identify your target audience
Once you have this data to hand, you should identify your target audience.
This may involve looking at existing customers or conducting market research to identify demographics, preferences and the behaviours of ideal customers.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics or social media insights along with traditional customer surveys to provide this level of data.
When you know your ideal audience, you can help choose the right channels and strategies to reach more of the ideal target market.
Choose your marketing channels
With this data in hand, you should choose your marketing channels.
These channels include search engine optimisation, paid marketing for example pay per click (Google Ads, Bing Ads), social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing or even affiliate marketing.
Define your marketing budget
When you have chosen the channels, you then need to set a budget.
We generally recommend that you choose a budget that you are comfortable with, but it needs to be a sufficient budget to successfully test each channel.
These will vary depending on the industry that you are in, and the geographic profile that you are seeking to target.
For example, a small business trying to cover their postcode and say a 10-mile radius could perhaps get by with a budget of around £1,000 monthly, however, a national or a national regional business would need a much larger budget.
Plan your campaigns
We then need to move to planning campaigns.
You need to map out the campaign objectives, the target market, and the key messages that you need to get across.
You should stress any unique selling points that you have as a business or any calls to action, for example, a free home survey, 10% off your first order or a free quotation.
Campaign implementation and monitoring
Now we are at this stage we can move to implementation and monitoring.
Once the campaigns are planned, it’s time to implement them.
As campaigns run, we need to continually monitor their performance using analytics tools and measuring performance against the key performance indicators, as we discussed earlier.
We should look at engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and the cost per conversion.
Some businesses struggle to achieve a cost per conversion that stacks up for their business, this will depend on your average order value, your average profit margins and the customer’s lifetime value.
Analyse campaign performance
As the campaigns run their course we need to conduct a thorough evaluation of their performance, comparing the results against the initial goals and determining their success.
Identify areas for your improvement
This includes identifying lessons learned and areas for improvement.
The team here at Altitude Internet have deep experience helping businesses develop and build out their marketing goals.
Feel free to get in touch today to arrange a kick-off meeting or to discuss your goals and aspirations and to see if we are a good fit for each other.
We have a team experienced in SEO, PPC, Social and Web Development, so no matter what you need, we have the skills in-house to get you found.
Our team can help put together a bespoke marketing plan for your budget to ensure that the best use of funds is applied to the areas most suitable for you.
If you found this blog of interest, this blog may be of interest too. Look at how dynamic telephone numbers can help you to track campaign performance.
The Benefit of Dynamic Telephone Numbers – and how they can help your business
This blog explains why you should choose a reputable agency like us to help you on your marketing journey.
10 Reasons to Choose a Digital Marketing Agency Like Altitude Internet
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