In this blog, we look at planning and setting a campaign budget. It's crucial that you know the goals you want to achieve before choosing a budget so that they have enough budget to get the results you want. So don't forget to read the first blog in our Digital Marketing Campaign series on goal setting here.
What are your priorities?
Now that you have decided where you want to see results, you can make the most of your money, not to mention your time, by allocating a budget to help you to achieve those results.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
- Who is my target audience and how do we reach them?
- What is the spend per platform going to be?
If you don't produce the content in-house, you will have to get someone to create it for you. This will be your first expense. Depending on how much content you need to produce for the campaign, you will pay a fixed amount to create content. Then you will decide how much to put towards getting that content out to the right audience.
Many different factors impact how much money you will need and where you're going to be spending it. Will you also need SEO? If it's a brand campaign and it's primarily living on social, then SEO isn't important. It becomes essential if you're going to be doing search ads and you want to rank for your content. Cost per click (CPC) is another strategy that is good for driving more qualified traffic through to your site, while mitigating spending crucial budget on vanity metrics such as impressions. Deciding on the right tools and platforms will depend mainly on the outcomes you would like to achieve.
In general, a large part of your budget will be spent on creating great content, and then a proportionate amount will be spent on promoting it. So, with a budget for a lead generation campaign, 60-75% is spent on the actual production of content (workflows, emails, landing pages, assets, social copy and designs) then about 25% would go to put it in front of the right audience.
Timelines are important
No matter how much money you spend on a campaign, it won't perform well unless it has enough time. So if you are just starting off, you might find that you have exciting content, but no one is interacting with it because you don't have any followers to engage with it. On the other hand, if your campaign time is too long and you don't have enough budget, then you're going to run out of budget before your campaign ends, and you're going to miss out on leads.
Use the data
It's essential to map out timelines that are realistic for the budget, and we generally recommend at least three months to see what is performing or not performing. The advantage of using digital marketing is that you can consult the data at any time to see if your efforts are bearing fruit or if it might be a good idea to focus them in another direction. You can use this information to adjust your budget if you need to. You can find out more about using reporting tools effectively in our blog.
Be agile
One key factor is understanding that everything will not work and some things will work better than expected. You will need to be agile with your budget so that you can use it to the best of your advantage. If something isn't working well, you will be able to tweak your budget and direct it somewhere else to get better results.
How much is enough?
Your budget will ultimately take into account the tools that you would like to use for your digital marketing efforts and the human resources required to run them. And you will divide the money you have available in proportion to their value and how much growth you would like to see in each area. But where do you get that initial figure from in the first place? Here are three suggestions from Forbes on how you can approach this:
- Cost of advertising – where you allocate funds according to how much it will cost you to acquire a customer.
- Revenue per customer – where you look at advertising spending in terms of return on investment and your goals for customer acquisition.
- Percentage of your total revenue – where your marketing budget is set in relation to how much you should spend based on your organisation's size.
When it comes to running your digital marketing campaign, there are also different options available to you. You could manage your marketing campaign in-house, use freelancers, or bring an agency on board. Of course, we favour the last option.
When you enlist the help of our agency, you will have a team of knowledgeable professionals at your disposal to assist you with every aspect of your campaign. We can help you allocate funds to the right channels for optimal growth and success. Work with an agency that is paid experts that have done this before for multiple clients and will be able to use your money to achieve your goals.
If you would like help to get your campaign off the ground, get in touch and see what we can do. We offer an array of digital marketing solutions to help grow your business.
