How To Allocate Your Marketing Budget This Year

Now that we’re into the first few months of the New Year, businesses are working to establish their annual marketing budgets.

This is one of the most important activities you can undertake for the future of your business, but knowing how to allocate your marketing budget for the upcoming year may not be easy. There are a number of factors you need to consider to ensure that you are putting your valuable resources where they’ll provide the greatest returns for your company.

Set up a Plan

The first step in allocating a marketing budget is to have a plan in place. It’s not uncommon for businesses to invest too much in their marketing efforts, but this leads to a loss in revenue and makes some businesses lose faith in effective marketing strategies.

On the other hand, not investing enough leads you to miss the opportunities that exist in your marketplace. This makes it difficult to determine where your marketing dollars are best spent in the future.

If your business is looking for a significant growth in its market share, then it will need to invest its resources accordingly. This will largely depend on the nature of your industry and the market behaviour.

Know Your Channels

There are many different channels through which to market your business. One of the biggest budgeting challenges is to determine how to allocate funds across these different channels.

Today’s businesses have online and offline marketing possibilities to utilize, and each one has its own strengths and drawbacks that determine how much of your budget it consumes.

The following are just a few of the channels available to your business:

• Outdoor projections
• Wildposting
• Events and promotions
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Industry experts predict that SEO and SEM will constitute the largest part of most businesses online marketing budgets, but traditional offline marketing avenues are still projected to provide a better ROI than their online alternatives.

Asking the Right Questions

In order to allocate your marketing funds accordingly, you need to consider some key questions as determining your budget requires more than simply deciding how much you’ll be spending in the coming year. You need to consider how many new leads you want to generate for your business along with the costs associated with generating leads and converting them into customers.

What are the primary objectives of your marketing efforts? For some, it may be to increase site traffic while others may need to improve the retention of their existing customers.

You should also consider whom you wish to target with your upcoming marketing campaigns. Understanding your ideal customer’s needs, interests, behaviours, and other factors ensures that your budget is allocated effectively.

Having a plan in place that takes into account the specific budgeting needs and limitations of your business is the first place to allocating a marketing budget for the year. Understanding the channels that are most effective in growing your business helps you see how much of your marketing dollars should go to each.

By considering the overall objectives of your business, you’ll know exactly how to spend your marketing budget to get the greatest results for the long term. For more information, contact the Grassroots Advertising team today.