Things you need to start evaluating your marketing budget.
Marketing is gradually becoming an organization’s lifeline. Nowadays, it’s as important to effectively market your product, as it is to create a useful one. That’s the reason businesses are abundantly increasing their yearly marketing budgets so that they can manage to showcase their products to their target customers adequately. However, in the process, they ignore the fact that a high budget is not enough to bring results. A thoughtful allocation of funds is required for every marketing operation and channel that is present in a business’s marketing strategy. Here are a few tips that can help you to optimize your marketing budget.
1. Set specific goals:
There is a fine line between setting specific marketing goals that are actually generic and setting exclusively specific marketing goals. For example, let’s say, your Digital marketing objective this year is to “increase your website traffic by 5%”. Unfortunately, this is still a generic marketing goal. A marketing goal should always have an explicit mention of the source that you would be leveraging in order to achieve that goal. In this case, a particular source can be Social media, content marketing, or SEO. Setting your marketing goals in this manner would help you to take a much more detailed decision regarding the budget that you have to set aside for the year.
2. Analyzing past efforts:
Have a detailed look at your previous year’s marketing strategies. You can generally bifurcate these into three categories, namely the successful ones, the failed ones, and the ones that have shown strong future potential. In this manner, you would be able to allocate finances to marketing operations based on their previous success and future scope. A segment that you should always set aside some funds for is testing new marketing operations and channels.This can be somewhere around twenty percent of your overall marketing budget.
3. Keeping track of industry trends:
Industry trends are something that you should consider before deciding your budget. There is a very strong possibility that the marketing strategy/channel that the majority of the players are adapting in your industry can provide you with your desired results as well. However, it’s advisable only to adapt the basic idea and not blindly copy your competitors. For example, one such trend that every other business is trying to adapt these days is introducing AI chatbots on their website, so that they can provide real-time service to customers on a 24/7 basis.
Therefore if you have bot development plans for your own business, you should make sure that the chatbot has those specific features and knowledge that can provide the maximum value for your customers.
4. Scaling up new projects:
You should have a very cautious approach while allocating budget to potential marketing ventures that you deem would be profitable to your business, for the current year and the future ones.
Always make sure that you start your prospective marketing ventures on a small scale basis. You should also target a particular segment within your overall customer base as a test case first.
There are two strong reasons behind not going full-on at first with your new marketing initiative. Firstly, the revenue that you had generated from your test operations can act as a buffer, when you launch full-scale operations for the new initiative. This reduces the risk of suffering a huge loss in case of failure.
Here are more of our great small business articles:
Tips To Help Your Business Grow Financially
Four Ways To Be Frugal As A Small Business Owner
Could You Be A Small Business Owner?
Photo Credit: Fiddler Jan.
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