In order to get the most from your marketing budget, you must allocate your resources, time and budget effectively. Online marketing budgets tend to be very tight and well-constructed, with high attention to detail, which makes trying to do everything you really want to do a challenge, especially with so many options available to you and your business.
Not to worry! We’ve come up with five key things to bear in mind. These will allow you to create a budget that meets your criteria, effectively and neatly. Utilise these tips, and you’ll find it difficult to go wrong.
- Carry the Same Message, Across a Balance of Platforms
Meaning that all your social media marketing communicates the same concepts as your online display advertising. Nowadays you have to view non-traditional marketing methods, such as Instagram and Twitter as being just as valuable and essential to your campaign, as say, email marketing. Social media marketing is not free however, you must allocate a section of your budget to the creation, content and maintenance of social media accounts. So many companies neglect social media, not seeing the opportunity it offers for direct communication between business and customer, while effectively humanising the company.
You never want any element of your campaign to be promoting anything that isn’t directly linked to the rest of your overall plan. Even a slight divergence represents a major leak, and is not only draining the budget, but it’s also taking away from the strength of the whole online marketing plan. Frequently trim away anything that doesn’t contribute to the overall goal.
- Always Start Small, Then Scale and Experiment
Never start off big or bite of more than you can handle. Once a certain avenue of your marketing campaign proves profitable, then you can scale and expand. This can involve experimentation with different platforms, social media or simply putting more focus and content into the proven pathways.
The purpose behind starting small is experimentation. It allows you to gauge what best connects with your customer base while not risking investment on costly media forms that might not pay dividends. It also allows for the profit from the smaller, more targeted campaign to be used later on for risky, potentially more profitable marketing methods.
- Perform Constant Monitoring and Think Up Some Quantifiable Goals
Set goals for each marketing strategy. This will allow you to measure profit and exposure against expenditures, therefore allowing you to balance your spending a lot more effectively. You’ll learn what to cut, and what to put more funding into. Use questionnaires and polls find out which of your online marketing systems lead to the majority of sales, as well as online data and cookies, then use this to fine tune your budget allocations.
- Aim for Complete Control
A lot of marketing strategies don’t allow for full spending control. Avoid spreading yourself too thin on a wide selection of different marketing systems by honing in on the ones that offer full governance of cost, targeting and methods. Google, Bing and Facebook are examples of strong marketing systems with high levels of control. Factor in the cost of selecting appropriate services.
Obviously, the higher your level of control, the tighter your budget can be, as you prune away non-functional resources and aim more at proven strategies. It all really comes down to having your finger on the pulse, and being able to monitor, control and therefore quantify results and failures. It allows your online marketing to quickly shape up into a well-oiled, slick machine.
- Keep Reminding People
One last thing to consider is remarketing. Remarketing is an extremely effective, targeted way of reaching your customers. A high percentage of the people perusing your site won’t become customers, and that’s where remarketing comes in. The majority of paid campaigns have the ability to cookie visitors who don’t convert or generate a lead, and through this you can provide more ads that remind the individual of your product or service while they’re on various high traffic sites. Essentially this reminds and leads people back to your site, and is another chance at creating a customer or lead. It’s something to seriously consider when laying down your budget allocations, whether or not the marketing services employed offer this invaluable service can make a fair difference in costs.
