Coming up with a digital marketing budget isn’t easy if you don’t have a solid digital marketing plan. The issue with many brands is they try using every marketing channel possible, without assessing whether it’s a right fit.
Another problem going this route is the digital marketing budget that goes along with it. The amount of money you’d have to spend in order to pull this off can be exponential. And unless you’re a major corporation, this will be impossible.
If you’re currently trying to put together a digital marketing budget for your business, then this guide should help.
Let’s take a look at what you can do to set a budget that works for your company needs.
Analyze Your Digital Marketing Successes
You won’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from. To help prevent repeating bad decisions, you need to pinpoint what’s worked for your marketing goals and what hasn’t.
Now, this doesn’t mean just looking back at the past year – it’s recommended that you look back at the past few years. If you have Google Analytics or a similar tool set up, then this shouldn’t be an issue.
The idea is to look at all of the sources that are driving the majority of the leads. Once you have numbers, you can start seeing which sources are driving what percentages of your leads and conversions.
Pay attention to each marketing channel you used in the past and how it corresponds with your sales metrics. Make a list of what’s working and what’s not working. This is the beauty of digital marketing – everything is recorded, right down to which pages are viewed and how often. You can’t do that with print ads.
Keep an unbiased view, so you’re able to drive out the low-performers.
Start Setting Goals
Now, you won’t get far in the planning of your digital marketing budget if you don’t have goals set. And by goals, we mean realistic and tangible goals that you can measure using your analytics tools.
Once you go over all your past failures and successes, it’s time to start setting the bar for the campaign you’ll run this year. The goals have to be strategic objectives that are very specific and quantifiable.
There are multiple levels to setting these goals. You can begin by identifying long-term and short-term company objectives. From here, you’ll have the understanding of the revenue required to achieve these goals.
Then this will pinpoint how many leads you’ll have to generate and what percentage you’ll need to convert. From here, things start to get interesting. The numbers you now have will help you to further break down your goals, giving you success measurements for each channel and tactic you end up using.
Have a specific digital marketing budget and results for your tactical goals. For instance, how much you’re going to spend on a particular tactic. How many clicks will you need or how many new leads do you have to attract for this tactic to work out?
Here’s an example:
- Digital marketing is the channel
- The platform is Google Adwords
- The tactic is PPC marketing
- The spend is $3K per month
- The goal is 20 conversions and 400 clicks
Of course, you want to keep your goals flexible since it’s very rare for a campaign to go completely as planned. You’ll have to do a bit of testing to see how you can improve each tactic to get numbers closer to your goal.
Certain factors that may affect the progress of your digital marketing include costs for ad groups and keywords on Google Adwords. These are constantly in flux, so not always easy to prepare for.
Then there are changes that may occur as the year goes on, which may mean changes for your digital marketing budget. Don’t make it so your goals aren’t flexible because this will make it difficult to succeed.
Let’s take a look at some of the goals you can set for your business.
Building Brand Awareness
Having visibility for your brand is crucial to increasing revenue and meeting revenue goals. In order to build brand awareness, you’ll have to complete certain smaller objectives.
For instance, you can focus on growing your followers on social media. Adding social buttons to all of your digital content and including URLs to your pages may help with this.
Then there’s improving your social engagement. You can try doing so by posting more content your audience finds relevant and high quality. This way, they’re more likely to like, comment and share it.
Getting more views and downloads for your content is another objective you can have to build brand awareness. This could consist of pointing more people to your free content downloads. For example, write blog posts that drive traffic and then asking visitors to sign up to your email list in exchange for your free eBook, white paper, etc.
Last, you can increase content shares to build awareness of your brand. The more people sharing your social media and blog posts, the more people will see it and your brand. You can do this by sharing your own content, as well as user-generated content.
Posts that are entertaining, insightful, funny and inspiring all help content go viral.
Increasing Your Sales
Another goal you may have is to give your sales a boost. What business doesn’t want to improve their revenue? If this is a goal you have, then there are smaller objectives you can achieve to do so.
For instance, you can try harder to convert first time buyers. You can do this by capturing emails of your buyers and then sending followup emails, discounts and sales information to help bring them back to your online store.
Another way is to upsell your products and services to increase shopping cart sizes. For example, if you see someone is purchasing a particular dress, you can upsell a matching purse or pair of shoes. Think of how department store clerks do it in the fashion sector.
You can do this in any industry you’re in. Cable companies do an excellent job of upselling their services.
Lastly, you want to try and turn customers into long-term, loyal customers. This way, over the course of a lifetime, they spend more money with you than any of your competitors. One idea is to offer loyalty rewards, special discounts tailored to their past purchases and so on.
Try to get to know your customers so you can make them offers that’ll make them return to your website to purchase.
Go Over Which Channels fit Your Digital Marketing Budget
Here’s where things may become a little tricky. There are so many different digital channels you can choose for your marketing strategy. Thankfully, you already crunched some numbers based on the channels you used in the past.
But does this mean you should avoid branching out to new mediums? Not at all. It’s best to start with what you know works, then slowly implement other channels to see how they pan out.
Let’s take a look at the different channels you may want to add to your digital marketing budget.
Your Website Design
Obviously, this will play a major role in your digital marketing strategy. This is the place you’ll send all of your incoming traffic, so it needs to be on point. Take this into account whether you’re building one from scratch or redesigning one.
It’s important to pay close attention to the performance of your website so you can make the right tweaks where needed. For instance, if there’s a page on your site that people consistently bounce away from, you need to investigate it to see why.
It could be due to the content, the layout or even the page load speed. Check all elements to pinpoint the problem. The same goes for the rest of your website. Take the time to go over the user experience of your site.
Display Advertising & PPC
Search engines are the key to driving traffic to your business. With paid search, you can gain a little more control of how much traffic you get and from what audience. Today, you can make specific campaigns for different groups of people so that it attracts prospects that are most likely to convert.
With PPC and display ads, you can set your digital marketing budget. Display ads are an economical form of digital advertising. You can implement graphic banners on websites within certain categories you choose.
PPC, on the other hand, is a bit more expensive, but it allows you to deeply customize your campaigns. You can choose the bids, time of day ads display, ad copy, location and much more.
Email Marketing
Yes, email marketing is very much alive and well, despite what some others may tell you. Tying this together with your other marketing methods, you can really grow your email subscription list. Your website plays a big role here.
Your email subscription box can either display permanent on the side of each page or you can have a pop-up box that shows up after a certain amount of time on the site. Collecting email addresses is still a clever way to remarket to interested prospects.
It can help convert them into customers and even turn current customers into repeat buyers. Just make sure you plan to do A/B split testing to see which strategies get the best response rate and engagement.
Social Media Marketing
You definitely don’t want to leave out the possibility of adding social media to your digital marketing budget. In fact, there’s a social network for every industry. You just have to find out where your audience hangs out and which platform best suits the type of content you produce.
For instance, if you’re in the floral business, then Pinterest and Instagram would be perfect since these are highly visual platforms. However, if you are a B2B business selling industrial equipment, then LinkedIn and Twitter may be better choices.
Again, you’ll have to research which platforms your particular audience use regularly to sort through your options.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is by far one of the most useful methods you’ll add to your digital marketing budget. It’s the strategy that keeps working for you long after you’ve paid for it. This is why it’s looked at as the free version of advertising compared to PPC.
Once you pay the SEO expert to organize the strategy and the writer to create the content, that particular piece will continue producing traffic for many years.
Of course, SEO isn’t just a set it and forget it type of deal. You’ll have to continue creating new content and tweaking your strategy to ensure you’re targeting the right keywords. Making it to the first page of Google is your goal and it’ll take time and diligence to get there.
But it’s definitely well-worth every penny you spend on it from your digital marketing budget.
Make a List of Priorities for Your Digital Marketing Budget
Wouldn’t it be great if you could launch campaigns for every digital marketing channel you’re interested in? Unfortunately, your digital marketing budget may not allow this. In this case, you’ll have to prioritize which channels you want to work on first.
As a rule of thumb, you want to begin with the most expensive things in your digital marketing budget. Then surround this method with the more cost-effective tactics.
In many cases, small and medium businesses work with a digital marketing agency to help bring order to the creation and execution of their strategy.
Finding a Digital Marketing Specialist
If you want to get expert help with your digital marketing strategy, then you can always enlist the help of an agency. At Top Spot, we have a team of experts who can help with all aspects of your digital marketing.
This includes website design and local and global marketing using search engine optimization. We can help you grow your leads, improve conversion rates and increase profits for your business.
Get in touch with us today for your free consultation!
