As a business owner or brand, you have to be acutely aware of all your expenses. This is the unseen aspect of business that people often forget can make or break your success, but it’s necessary to finding and maintaining that success. Being able to juggle finances and consider a budget for marketing is a specific offshoot of the financial literacy you need.
Your marketing efforts will help you potentially expand your profit and get your brand out there which helps growth, but it begins with figuring out how to maximize every penny for your marketing goals. There are plenty of important factors to discuss when dealing with a marketing budget, so here are some things you’ll want to always keep in mind when you are handling the finances for your marketing plan. If you are going to run new business you can read this article.
Hiring Outsourcing Services
If you’re planning on hiring outsourcing services to do your marketing, you’ll need to think about how this adds up in your budget. It’s not a bad idea at all to outsource your marketing work, in fact, it’s highly recommended for especially busy brands. The difference between building an in-house team for marketing and getting an SEO service is huge, and it plays a big role in your budget. Outsourcing your work isn’t cheap, but it could potentially pay off well if you pick the right services. You want to consider how much they charge, potential packages for deals, and how long you intend to work with them.
Building a Campaign vs. Individual Spots and Ads
There are often two types of approaches to marketing material: the first is a campaign intended for a long run of marketing for your business and brand, and the second is a focus on individual marketing materials, like a spot or an ad. A campaign is going to take more research and development to come up with a plan of attack and an idea, plus it may end up costing more, whereas individual spots or ads can be cheaper, but more difficult to maintain over time. You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket here, but over diversifying what approach may leave you strapped for cash for other marketing or budgetary needs.
Size and Scope of the Campaign
A marketing campaign isn’t always large in scale either. It could be a collection of ads that are running for a two-week period, then you move on to a new marketing approach. However, usually with the amount of effort put into a marketing campaign, the intent is to make something that can hopefully stand on its own merit where you can use your marketing budget to keep it afloat by getting airtime or visibility online. The bigger the scope and scale of the campaign the more money it could be in the short term until it takes off, but it could end up eating away at the budget if it isn’t successful quickly enough.
Duration of the Marketing Campaign
The duration was mentioned in regards to successful market penetration and audience retention as well as the recurring costs. When you run a large-scale marketing campaign, your hope is that it’ll be big enough to capture a core demographic, like business entrepreneurs for an online course business, in a quick amount of time so that the costs eventually even out on a return of customers. The longer it runs without that penetration, the more the costs are going to eat into potential profit, which means you have to make an executive decision on when to pull the plug. You can look at it as a failure or a learning lesson, but understanding the duration of your marketing efforts is a good factor in planning a budget.
Type of Marketing Focus
The use of SEO outsourcing was brought up earlier and it’s good to come back to that as an example of a marketing focus. The evolution of marketing has moved quickly into the online sphere because of increased traffic and consumer presence on search engines and online compared to traditional media (television, billboards, radio ads), so finding a cost-effective way to market is always useful. With that being said, cost-effectiveness doesn’t always mean it works for your business. If you sell products to a demographic that is largely not present online, traditional marketing may still be in your favor, which will factor into your budget.
Building a budget for the various functions of your business is integral to your success. One, in particular, that is an investment in the future of your company is your marketing budget, so use these factors when considering how to plan your finances around it.
