Develop A Marketing Budget

One of the trickiest parts of marketing is determining a budget for all of your advertising. You can either low-ball a number to spend, or strategically measure out a budget based on data. If you don’t add enough into your budget, you could be faced with missed opportunities and underperform and not meet your goals.

If you are a new company, choosing a budget can be more difficult as you are not entirely sure how many leads or conversion you will receive with a certain amount of budget. For the first month, have your budget set at what you are comfortable spending. After you have a full month’s worth of data, there are a few things you can do:

• Look at the Number of Conversions
• Determine your ROI
• Determine Cost per Conversion

As a company who has experience in marketing their business and products, you can look at past years’ data and see if they were effective and how they can be improved. When setting up your marketing budget, look at a few concepts before determining your budget.

What Are You Annual Goals

It’s the beginning of the year or even quarter, and you have made marketing goals for your company in order to succeed. You’ll need to align your marketing budget with your goals, and make sure they are realistic and support your growth plan.

Know Your Sales Funnel

Looking at past data is going to be your best friend in determining what type of budget your company can financially handle. When looking at data of past campaigns look to see how many qualified leads (form submissions, calls, etc.) you received during a specific period of time. From those leads, how many of those turned into paying customers? This data will help you determine your cost per conversion and cost per transaction, all important when determining if a marketing channel is working for your company.

What Types of Campaigns Will You Run

Every campaign you will run will cost a different amount. This is where you will need to determine how much the CPC (cost per click) will cost you. Again, the most important thing that is going to help you determine a budget and the types of campaigns you will run is by looking at past campaigns and seeing what their CPC was. From there you can get a good idea as to what if will cost next month.

A budget can consistently change, whether it’s month-to-month or quarterly, but if you are tracking the data and metrics of how the campaign performed, you will be able to determine if the campaign was successful. That will help you plan our future budgets and marketing campaigns.

If you need help determining your marketing budget, or even your marketing goals, Big Marlin Group is here for you. Contact us today to learn more about how we track and measure every detail when it comes to marketing!