When it comes time to plan a marketing budget, most business owners and managers look at how others are spending their marketing budgets. Using this approach is tempting, but the trouble with this method is that, when it comes to the budget for digital marketing, not only in the field relatively new, but most owners and managers have no experience in the area, which ends up being shorted or eliminated entirely.
SBA Poll: Where to spend a marketing budget
According to a recent poll conducted by the Small Business Administration, business owners and managers who expressed an opinion responded that the top area where they wanted to increase the amount of their marketing budget was in the area of digital marketing. Obviously, when a business is in a short supply of experts who can accomplish a bonafide digital marketing effort, they should engage a digital marketing company like Appiloque, which can begin these efforts almost immediately but can save a business considerable amounts of money in the process.
Where should digital marketing dollars be spent?
Despite what many business people believe there really is a well-grounded way to determine where it is best to spend digital marketing dollars, and it has nothing to with crystal balls and magic wands. Instead, the best way to determine where to spend digital marketing dollars is just like other methods: where your customers are.
Plainly stated, a digital marketing budget should start with a careful analysis of every piece of a closed business in 2019. This is particularly true if you are in a service business. Either way, the mission should be where to get leads from.
After the planning process is started, questions should be asked:
What were the top 10 vertical markets that brought the business in last year?
Who is the top client in each vertical, and what brought them to our business?
Now that these sources are identified, the digital marketing efforts of a business should be focused around them and support them.
Google docs can be used to create a list of any of a business’s current clients and the amount of total revenue generated from them. After these sources are identified a businessperson should have a much clearer idea of where they should direct their budget. For example, putting out LinkedIn videos, being on boards, social media, and attending events and shooting videos is all great, but what percentage of each should you use? If 35 percent of business comes from organic leads, backlinking, content creation, and technical SEO, it stands to reason that improving these things on a website will increase the number of conversions brought about by it.
Following the Crowd
One problem that looms large over the creation of a digital marketing budget is owners and managers who are new to the field and try to follow the leads set by others. It has to make you wonder if others are doing it, why shouldn’t I? This is true enough until you tell yourself, just because others are doing it doesn’t mean it is working for them. In these cases, of course, the wise money would be on determining when the return is far too low and withdrawing from that avenue.
It’s all about you
Every business is different. In the final analysis, a business owner or manager should determine what the best course of the market is and pursue it, but in the long run, it comes down to spending a budget on what works.
