Every brand seeks for the best results for and that happens only when the product is marketed through proper channels with an apt digital marketing campaign budget. Today every brand is making complete use of digital marketing medium to enhance and widen their reach in the market. But also, many brands are facing constraints while deciding the Digital Marketing Budget.
Therefore, while planning out a digital marketing budget and chalking out the strategy, you should always ask few questions that what is the purpose and what is going to be the target audience.
There is a lot more, but always keep in mind that spending more money doesn’t equate to success. And it’s quite easy to waste money on digital marketing. Here is the guide through which you will be able to decide the apt budget for your next Digital Marketing Campaign.
There are multiple sectors in the market in which the companies fall under various scale. It is a logical fact that not every company is going to have the same budget. It also depends on the type of company. Usually, the average percentage of budget spent on digital marketing by the companies as follows:
It has been seen that, Salesforce, being a SaaS (Software as a Service) company invests 49% of the revenue in sales and marketing and receives 24% growth year-over-year.
Microsoft invests around 17% of the revenue in sales and marketing and experiences 5% revenue growth year-over-year. “Marketing leaders spent more on their websites, digital commerce and digital advertising than on other categories in 2016,” reported Gartner. “Marketers spent 9% of their budgets on websites, the most out of 14 spend categories surveyed.”
Set the goal for digital marketing budget
While planning the digital marketing campaign, always ask yourself a question, what is the ultimate goal? Under this you will come across three options, whether you want the campaign for brand awareness, engagement or sales.
If you are clear of what you want, then you can proceed with deciding the budget. Considering for startups, then brand awareness becomes the vital goal.
This may result in deploying budget for content creation and later augmenting it via paid promotion. In case of established brands, the focus will be on conversions and the budget is allocated accordingly. All you have to do is decide and proceed to the next step.
Analysis of the previous digital marketing campaigns
Analyzing the earlier campaigns is an important task that helps in getting an idea of what needs to be done this time and how to do it in a better way.
This is an important step as when you go through the previous strategies, you realize how much was unnecessarily invested and what was lacking.
You can take up a detailed analysis of all the social media platforms and to what extent that channel is contributing to the overall success of campaigns.
Never forget your audience
A lot needs to be done while planning out a digital marketing campaign budget with keeping in mind the interest of the audience. Every single penny is worth that you spend on social media advertisements, regardless of whether you’re purchasing advertising space or paying to boost relevant content to audiences.
Finding out the best social media platform for brand and then taking action can count a lot. Facebook, which remains the most popular platform with more than 1.55 billion users usually works the best for almost all type of brands.
Always try to showcase content that people want to read on each social media platform. Avoid constant selling with newspaper-style ads. Ask yourself, is this something you would enjoy having in your own news feed constantly? This perspective will help you in strategizing digital marketing campaigning in a more focused way.
Market research is a must
It is always considered wise to research before going ahead with any plan. And undoubtedly, it is important to take a digital walk in the market of what your competitors are doing on all the social media platforms.
It is the fact that you want to do something out of the box to keep yourself up in the audience and for that research is the key. The research helps you in spotting new trends in the market and decide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Thus, at this stage, market research and competitor analysis plays an important role.
Budget allocation
Here comes the most critical step, allocating the right amount of digital marketing budget for the campaign. Start defining how you will distribute marketing spend by creating a list of all the channels and tactics at your disposal.
All of this includes content marketing, social media marketing, e-mailers/ newsletters, paid search, mobile marketing to name a few.
After this step, calculate properly that which platform is going to experience the higher impact of your goals and then dispose the budget for those digital platforms. Be wise in spending your money because that is going to give you results in the long run and also you can’t afford to miss out on anything. Also you must keep a contingency fund for the emergency situations to fulfill the last minute requirements of your digital marketing campaign.
Measure the spread of your customers on all social media platforms
It is really important to know where all your customers are digitally. And if you know where to tap audience then you will reap positive outcomes from digital marketing campaign. If you are considering a budget for Inbound Marketing, then you have to find the means to lure the customers.
This means that attracting people to website or by the effective placement of ads on popular social media sites. This works best with e-mail marketing, website based contact (includes both SEO and web content) and social media placement.
People can find you through various means that includes organic search, e-mail (utm medium), paid and social. All you have to do is find this out and then invest the digital marketing campaign budget in that direction.
Landing page optimization
If you are focusing on generating more leads and increasing sales, then allocating the budget to increase number of clicks on the landing pages can turn out to be a vital thing. Your mission should be to allocate your budget across marketing channels that achieve the best results in two areas
“The first number you need to uncover is your average cost per lead. This is how much you spend in order to acquire a new potential customer – not an actual customer. You can calculate this number by dividing the total amount spent on marketing by the number of leads generated. For example, if you spend ₹100,000 on marketing and generate 1,000 leads, your cost is ₹100 per lead.”
Make use of apt keywords
Your SEO keywords are one of the most important parts of AdWords campaigns. Your ads will get sort through Google’s algorithms. Use the AdWord Keyword Planner to get keyword statistics, or if you’re stuck for ideas can help a lot.
There’s a number of AdWords Tools that can optimize keyword selections for you.
Predict and measure Return on Investment
You are pouring in money then the returns has to be good. The Return on Investment (ROI) can be met when the KPIs are fulfilled.
By calculating spend on overall digital marketing and the hike in sales, you can easily determine whether the digital marketing campaign has been successful or not.
This sneak-peak for fixing the digital marketing budget this year will give you major goals. The best routine is researching and getting the job done. The digital marketing campaign budgets are not that easy as it looks. Keep an eye on the recent trends and check on your competitors.
Remember that, every brand is unique and has varied goals to achieve. Thus, be wise in how much you can afford and deploy those funds which can reap you long term benefits.
