It can be a daunting task to go about making the most of your marketing budget, but for any business, running a cost effective marketing campaign is a top priority.

It should produce the best results while spending as little as possible. In order to do that, it will require intensely creative moves on the part of the marketer.

In this article, we are going to go over the best ways to handle your marketing budget, and how to make the most out of it.

The most important allocations

The digital age has brought with it new basic necessities when it comes to the promotion and protection of an enterprise’s brand. As more and more businesses & companies scramble to and through the digital space every day, it has become increasingly important to have a well-maintained online presence.

As such, a registered web domain is a good baseline and a necessary expense in your marketing budget (the initial web design should be part of your overhead).

Having a website is generally an easy and cost-effective way to deliver messages, freely advertise, and answer frequently asked questions about your product or service.

Having a robust marketing team is also a necessity, especially for bigger businesses or businesses that are scaling.

As a company expands, so too should its marketing operations. With a sufficiently large team, it makes it easier to manage all the diverse strategies to marketing more efficiently and effectively.

Other worthy allocations in your marketing budget

The hiring of new staff should also be supplemented by paying for automated marketing services, such as chatbots, good support documentation and video tutorials.

This eliminates the need for there to be dedicated members of your staff answering customer inquiries that could be answered automatically by a chatbot, especially if there are similarities and trends in the customers’ questions.

Sponsored web content is also a good investment when it comes to the field of digital marketing. A lot of information on the internet is driven from an insatiable desire of the market to consume content; as such, it would do your brand well to produce meaningful and engaging ways to convey its message.

This could come in the form of content marketing or video marketing or a combination of both. And the wonderful thing about either is that Search Engine Optimization can be applied to both of them so that your enterprise’s website and social media could rank better on search engines.

All of these methods will be discussed later in greater detail.

How much of my gross revenue should I allocate?

One of the main causes of businesses failing early on in their lifespans is undercapitalization. The same can be said of the marketing in its early stages. As such, it is important to allocate a significant portion of your revenue towards your marketing—as much as 12–20%.

As for what the goal of the budget should be around this time: it should be designed around brand awareness and capturing a new market. And once you’ve reached a point where the branding of your business has been built up, you could start to reduce your budget.

If your business has been in operation for longer than five years, has established its brand, and staked a claim in its market, it should allocate about 6–12% of its projected gross or gross revenue to marketing.

Content creation is essential in today’s market.

We spoke before on the benefits of investing in the creation of meaningful and engaging content, but in this section, we aim to highlight the importance of content creation and content marketing even further.

Videos, blogs, whitepapers, infographics, and other materials can go a long way towards elevating and increasing brand awareness. In today’s content-driven environment, it is important to keep your target audience interested and invested.

Content creation can also help you capture new markets with targeted content striking at the heart of their interests and tastes, which is now easily deduced by the gathering of data.

And while it takes time and expertise to create content, it is now more easy to outsource this endeavor to other service providers in order to alleviate the weight of content creation from your marketing team’s shoulders.

Referral programs and customer advocacy are a worthy expense

Allowing your existing customers better deals on future purchases through customer advocacies can help them feel valued. Such programs could turn customers into repeat customers.

Their testimonials and referrals could help your business gain new customers that you otherwise would not have gained through any means.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is still a powerful form of marketing. And as such, a referral program wherein your existing customers could get discounts if they referred new customers might be the perfect way to stoke the fires of a word-of-mouth campaign.

Software can make your life easier

The wonderful thing about the information age is the intense level of automation we can now apply to the operations of a business. A lot of the things businesses used to by hand (even in marketing) can now be done on and by computer software.

We’ve mentioned chatbots before as a way to automate responses to customer inquiries. Why stop there? Using the right social media management tools, for example, can allow you to produce and release content on the right schedule.

Some of these tools are even capable of gauging the optimum time to release content for maximized viewership.

Outsource some of your operations

Nearly everything, from the regular creation of content to your company IT needs, can be outsourced to a service provider if you know where to look.

And one of the great things about outsourcing services is that they often don’t cost the same amount of money as keeping someone on staff to do it, especially if they need specialized equipment that your business would have to provide.

Make sure to look into the things you can outsource to other providers so that you and your core team could dedicate their efforts to more worthwhile endeavors. Partner with vetted providers to make sure you get your money’s worth.

In conclusion

Marketing is a treacherous field, with results that are sometimes difficult to measure or describe. Luckily, modern technology has given us new and inventive avenues not only to market but to measure the success of these advertising endeavors. And with the right budget and the right strategy, you could quite possibly achieve all that you hope for your business.

If you need help with your next marketing campaign, why not try MarketPlan today? We have the expertise and resources you need to take your business to greater heights.