Marketing needs to positively impact your sales and brand reach to justify the budgetary burden it represents. Planning your promotional spending carefully and revising it each year is essential.
If you’re unsure how to start this process but want to achieve big things in 2023, read on as we go over everything you need to know to set and manage a marketing budget.
What the budget should include
There are a number of things to factor into your budget for marketing, some of which are rigidly defined while others are more varied and unique to your organization’s needs. This includes:
A robust website tuned to generate sales
Every small business needs to work on its web presence, and a well-designed website is a cornerstone.
Regardless of when you carried out the most recent redesign, it’s worth evaluating the effectiveness of your site annually and planning to assign some of your marketing budgets to deal with any deficiencies you detect.
Focus on landing page performance; if people are arriving on your site but not converting, you need to work out why and make changes to fix this.
A video marketing strategy to maximize engagement
You can use video marketing for B2B and B2C customer engagement, and your content is very versatile. For example, after making a video testimonial, this can be showcased on your site, shared on your social channels, and sent to individual prospects as needed.
Your video marketing strategy needs to cover more than testimonials, of course. It could include content that acts as an explainer for how products work or provides answers to common questions that your sales team encounters.
A CRM that does it all
You can amalgamate many functions into a customer relationship management (CRM) platform or a cloud crm for small business, so procuring the right one for your business will transform the sales journey from start to finish.
There are plenty of CRMs suited to smaller firms, and the top options combine marketing automation with customer feedback management and much more besides. This means that even modestly sized teams can handle the needs of all customers efficiently and keep them coming back for more.
What you need to do to manage your budget
In terms of actually making sure that your budget is comprehensive and accurate enough to deliver on initial expectations, there are a few things to think about, such as:
Who you’re selling to
If you don’t have a buyer’s persona in place, then make this a priority. By understanding your audience and knowing everything about them, from their age to their average income, you’ll be better equipped to adjust your marketing efforts to target them.
Who you’re competing against
You can’t manage a marketing budget well if you aren’t also familiar with the rival companies that you need to be besting.
By exploring the types of campaigns that competitors are running and looking at what they’re likely spending to achieve the reach they have, you’ll have data that can influence your own decisions.
What your operational costs will be
Lastly, it’s impossible to balance and maintain a reasonable budget for marketing if you aren’t doing so in the context of your broader operational costs.
There’s no point plowing large sums into promotions only to completely eclipse the price you pay to keep the company afloat.
The bottom line is that the best-managed marketing budgets are closely observed and regularly tweaked.
