Setting your online marketing budget takes careful planning, strategic goal setting, and a good understanding of the kinds of tools you need to use in your marketing efforts. With so many online marketing channels available to you, it’s important to set a budget that aligns with your business goals. Then, you need to allocate it to different types of online marketing efforts in a way that maximizes the return on your investment. How do you do this? Here are a few tips that can help.
Setting Your Total Online Marketing Budget
First, you need to determine how much of your total revenue you can reasonably dedicate to online marketing. Most businesses allocate about 5% to 12% of their gross revenue to all their marketing, with the majority of that investment going towards online efforts. Newer businesses aiming for growth may need to invest in the higher end of this range, while established companies can often see success with a lower percentage.
Your company’s goals also play an important role in setting your budget. If you want to achieve rapid, noticeable results, a more generous budget may be necessary than for a slow, steady burn on your marketing efforts.
Prioritizing Your Online Marketing Efforts
Once you know your total marketing budget, the next step is to decide where you’re going to focus your efforts. Want to focus on brand awareness? You’ll need a more long-term investment into content and social media. Want immediate conversions? Put more of your budget towards paid advertising.
From there, you’ll need to narrow down your goals to more specific objectives—for example, generating leads, increasing website traffic, growing your email list, and so on. Each of these objectives can require a different mix of tactics.
To drive traffic to your website, you might invest more in Google Ads and SEO efforts. To generate leads, promoting landing pages and lead magnets via PPC and email campaigns could be a better choice. To grow brand recognition, consider more social media marketing.
Dividing Your Budget
While every business is different, and your exact allocation will vary based on the goals mentioned above, a balanced approach is often a good choice for sustainable results in your online marketing efforts. Most balanced campaigns give pay-per-click and search engine optimization in Kansas City eachroughly 30% of their online marketing budget. This leaves between 10% and 15% each to social media marketing, email marketing, and content creation efforts. If you’re not sure where to focus your budget and your efforts, be sure to work with a professional online marketing company for guidance.