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Whether you’re a start-up or a multinational, marketing is crucial to the lifeblood of your business. In this article, we’ve dug up 8 essential tips for creating a marketing budget that works for your business and helps it grow.
- Get your financial information sorted
First and foremost, an effective marketing budget needs to be designed based on sound and reliable financial information. You need to organise the revenue information of your company, and create a system which takes into consideration income and expenses, not just total revenue.
- Examine what has worked historically
It pays to look back over previous campaigns if you have any, as if it emerges that one particular strategy has worked well in the past, it’s well worth seeing if it will work again instead of delving into untested waters with something new.
- Be willing to try something new
Just as it is important to stick with strategies if they’ve worked in the past, it’s equally important to be able to recognise when something simply isn’t working and needs to be replaced with something new. All marketing departments should regularly use data to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies in terms of ROI and performance in relation to other previous or existing campaigns.
- Understand your limitations
Having a clear understanding of how much money you have to spend might seem like an obvious thing to do, but many companies make the mistake of leaving the marketing budget out of their calculations or purposely leaving it ambiguous. Having a clear idea of how much money you have at your disposal makes it easier to settle on which channels are within your means.
- Look closely at your target audience
A well designed marketing budget should take into consideration all the classic elements of a business plan, including who the target audience isUnderstanding who your target audience is means you can spend strategically on marketing channels that they engage with.
- Always leave money for the essentials
Events, branding, website, social media, advertising and content are six essential marketing elements that absolutely must be included in an effective marketing plan if a business is to grow and survive. Everything else is optional.
- Think in percentages
Broadly speaking, a new business aged between one and five years should be spending 12-20% of their gross revenue on marketing. This number is high because this early stage is crucial for brand building and capturing market share. Once the business is established, the marketing budget can drop down to between 6 and 12%.
- Revisit annually
Marketing budgets should be reviewed on an annual basis so that they continue to effectively serve the interests and needs of your business as it grows.
DMS are an established mail house in Melbourne offering quality marketing solutions to businesses of all sizes.