The single most important thing in marketing is your marketing budget. Here’s why:
- it fuels your marketing department,
- helps you develop your marketing plan,
- gives your marketing direction,
- brings perspective to your long-term goals,
- and makes every marketing initiative possible.
Indeed, if you want to maximize every cent you invest in your marketing effort, you need a solid marketing budget.
In this article, which is a short intro to our ebook, we’ll look at the importance of having an efficient marketing budget and show you the secrets to making an effective marketing budget in five easy steps.
Is a marketing budget important for my company?
In one word: YES!
When you have a solid marketing budget, you have a financial roadmap to guide your marketing effort. Without it, you’re lost – blindly leading your company towards its inevitable demise.
Here are a few reasons why you must invest more time in perfecting your marketing budget:
Helps you foresee future problems
Marketing departments must quickly adjust and adapt to the market’s uncertainties. With a marketing budget, you can allocate funds for your marketing teams to roll with the market’s flow.
Helps you stay on top of your finances
Knowing how much money you’ll spend and earn over a specific time is essential. It clarifies where your money should go to meet your marketing goals.
Lets you distribute your money accordingly
While marketing’s purpose hasn’t changed in centuries, marketing’s complexity continues to grow. For your marketing department to work effectively, you need to know how much you’re willing to spend on each marketing channel.
Helps you polish your marketing plan and strategy
Your marketing plan and strategy must include your marketing budget. It’s the only way to set attainable goals and milestones. That sense of direction is invaluable for any company.
The Secrets for an Effective Marketing
Budget in 5 Steps
Creating a marketing budget that will help you stay on top of your marketing finances is simple when you use the right method. And while there isn’t a perfect formula that can be applied to all businesses, we believe our method is effective because it works for our clients and us.
The five steps below highlight how you can create an effective marketing budget. For a more in-depth guide, download our ebook, The Modern Approach to Marketing Budgets.
1. Evaluate your company
The first step to creating any budget is to assess your company’s overall finances. You must know how much money you’re spending within every part of your company to decide how much money you’d like to spend/invest in your marketing department. No correct number or percentage exists because every company has a different marketing approach.
2. Set smart marketing goals
Your marketing effort will only succeed if you’re consistent for an extended period. You must set achievable marketing goals for the foreseeable future. We suggest using the now well-known acronym: SMART.
S – Smart
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Timely
For example, “Increase our marketing ROI by 12% and website traffic by 15% in the next 6 months using paid advertising and content creation.”
3. Get to know your customers
Knowing your customers is the best way to sell to them and determine how much you should spend to reach them. Find out everything you can about your target customers to determine how you’ll connect with them. You must also be aware of every step in the buyer’s journey.
We recommend the AIDA formula:
- Attention: prospect finds out about you
- Interest: they think you can help solve their problem
- Desire: they want to buy from you
- Action: they take action on your products/services
4. Be clear on your marketing strategy
Your marketing budget goes hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy – one cannot function without the other. So, you must clarify your marketing strategy before deciding on a marketing budget.
Some marketing strategies for B2B:
- Content types: how-to guides, landing pages, infographics, success stories, ebooks, webinars, case studies, and product overviews.
- Communication channels: conferences, content marketing, emails, outbound calls, paid search, and search engines.
Some marketing strategies for B2C:
- Content types: blogs, videos, customer reviews, social media posts, how-to guides, infographics, checklists, and quizzes.
- Communication channels: content marketing, social media, podcasts, influencer marketing, ads, and search engines.
5. Choose your team wisely
Once you’ve evaluated your business’s financials, established your marketing goals, analyzed your target audience, and clarified your marketing strategy, you must hire the right talent to set it all in motion. Your marketing teams can be made up of several types of talent:
- Internal teams
- Freelancers
- Marketing Agency
One isn’t better than the other. It all depends on your willingness to invest in a competent team.
The spreadsheet, that sweet old friend
The five steps above are everything you need to create a solid marketing budget. But now what?
Now, it’s time to sit down and input all those numbers into something manageable and easy to access. If you’re thinking about using Excel or Google Sheets, don’t.
While spreadsheets have been organizing our businesses for decades (apparently since 1979), they’re quickly becoming inadequate tools for modern companies. These soon-to-be relics are unintuitive, time-consuming, and a nightmare to look at.
Do yourself a favor and ditch the spreadsheets. Use a marketing resource management (MRM) to manage your marketing budget.
Forget about using complex Excel formulas. Instead, use MARMIND’s Budget Management Software. It will minimize mistakes, save time, and help you stay on top of your marketing budgets in real-time.
Last thoughts
When we think about marketing, we often envision creative ad campaigns, impactful billboards, cool magazine spreads, and promotional content. But none of these are possible without a marketing budget. It’s the heart that pumps life into your marketing teams and gives them the means to create winning marketing campaigns. That said, investing in your marketing budget is invaluable.
Author
Peter Fechter
Peter is Digital Marketing Manager at MARMIND and is mainly responsible for website and lead management. When he's not busy creating content, he is developing new strategic approaches for campaign planning.