How To Create An Efficient Digital Marketing Budget
The continuous progress of every business lies strongly in effective and results-oriented marketing. There’s a popular saying that “A business, small or big, that doesn’t advertise is a like a boy winking at a girl in the dark; nobody, not even the girl can see him, only he knows what he is doing”.
Hence, it’s important for business owners, investors, and entrepreneurs to understand that marketing goes a long way to announce a business to prospective customers or even to a larger audience. However, as important as marketing is to the growth of a business, more important is understanding how to creatively draft a good budgeting plan for the digital marketing exploits of your business. This also includes evaluating the Return on Investment (ROI) after activation.
There are quite a number of factors that determine how to create an effective budget for the digital marketing campaign of your organization which can also be implemented by a reputable digital marketing agency. They include but are not limited to the size of your organization, the financial capacity of your business, the online channels and the target audience.
Size of the organization
A small or medium enterprise is definitely not strong enough to outmuscle a big establishment regarding finances and budget allocation for traditional marketing such as television, radio, and newspaper, let alone modern marketing methods such as content, email, and social media marketing. Having a full understanding of this fact, helps a company decide the budget percentage it commits to digital marketing from the yearly revenue it generates.
A company that makes below five million dollars a year can begin with a 7-10% digital marketing budget; eventually, the returns on investment this generates will consequently help the business form a decision on the sufficient resources to invest for future digital marketing.
Financial capacity
There’s no gainsaying that crucial to the budget allocation of every business establishment, is the capacity of such businesses financially. That saying that big corporations are more open to opting or budgeting for digital marketing campaigns that are pricey. A bigger corporation is more likely to settle for a bill-board campaign if it’s capable of generating the required targets; making a budget for such will not be a challenge because the organization has the financial strength when compared to a smaller business, who might desire budgeting for such campaign but restraints financially will be the problem.
Online channels and target audience
The importance of owning a functioning website and user-friendly website cannot be over-emphasized here because these days people make searches for companies online and desire to have a sense of conviction before deciding to do business with a company or not. It doesn’t go without saying that; it’s essential to commit a certain budget percentage for your company’s online presence. Without doing this, potential customers or even existing customers will be lost to competitors and also other companies who make adequate budgeting for communicating with their customers online. The online channels you deploy for your business has to be user-friendly and interactive because this speaks volume of how informed your customers are and how they, in turn, understand your business language.
Having carefully examined the factors that determine how to create an effective digital marketing budget, below are other crucial points that will ultimately guide your digital marketing decision.
Evaluation and re-evaluation of marketing investments
So, why is it important to evaluate and re-evaluate? It’s highly imperative to do a study of the tactics, figures that have been committed towards a digital marketing campaign by your organization like this in turn help to understand the productivity of one online channel over the other. This as well as helps to inform which online channels require more attention for more publicity and productivity of your business.
Needless to say, that flexibility is also significant here, because sometimes all your business requires is an impromptu digital marketing campaign which might not be in the original & master plan you had previously, but this is the essence of a constant evaluation or monitoring of the budget committed to digital marketing. It also helps you study the process, understand if there’s been a mistake regarding a marketing channel deployed, inform you on the most productive channel and consequently the decision of investing in impromptu budgeting for a digital campaign becomes unavoidable.
Digital marketing channels
There are so many digital marketing channels that can be utilized to help propel your organization to greater heights, however understanding the best channel that works or where your target audience can be reached is crucial in the decision of budgeting. Nevertheless, some of the channels mostly deployed by businesses include email marketing, affiliate marketing, social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, Google AdWords, paid search, mobile marketing, Video Advertising, Display Advertising & Webinars.
It may be tempting to ask how can my organization create an effective budget allocation across all these channels? To do this, it’s important to note that not all organizations can be financially capable to have a digital marketing budget for all these channels. However crucial to the budgeting decision by your organization is the revenue generated at the end of the year. Also, important to mention here is the fact that businesses do not necessarily require investing in all channels but actually committing to any or some of the best digital marketing platform that gives the best returns on Investments(ROI).
An industry really determines the type of channel that suits it, content Marketing might be a sound idea in advertising while mobile marketing might do the magic in the medical field.
Conclusion
Examples of digital marketing budgets differ for organizations due to the yearly revenue generated. However, while there’s no fixed figure or percentage that should be budgeted for different channels of digital marketing by organizations, a conscious effort should be dedicated to ensuring that a large percentage of the budget is earmarked towards a channel that’s been consistently yielding returns on investment and not budgeting for a channel because it’s trendy or being used by other organizations. This might eventually become counter-productive.