How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Budget Plan

3 Sep ‘19

In: Marketing, / By: Ripe Media

Do you have a marketing budget plan? Maybe you’re looking to create one for the first time, or maybe you’re looking to revamp the one you already have. Either way, this guide will help you ensure you’re spending your money wisely.

Creating a digital marketing budget can seem daunting, especially when there’s so much competition. For example, Instagram has over 500 million users.

Keep reading to learn how to spend the right way to make your brand stand out.

Your Marketing Budget Plan

Anywhere from 1 to 20 percent of your revenue should be devoted to your digital marketing budget, depending on your situation. Once you know which percentage is right for your brand, how do you distribute it?

Before we get to more specific marketing tips, remember the 80/20 rule. This rule applies to almost every aspect in business, and your advertising budget is no exception. If you spend 20% of your time creating content, you should spend the other 80% of the time promoting that content.

Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty.

Goal Setting

Whenever you make a plan, this needs to be step one, and in digital marketing, you need to figure out whether you want to increase brand awareness or get a higher click-through rate.

What’s most important for your business? Do you want to create a community of brand ambassadors? Then you should focus on creating engaging content that’s exciting to consume.

Do you want to increase website visitors? Then you want to create educational content with a hook to get readers to click on your website.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

If you’ve already tried a tactic, or a competitor has, then use that information to your advantage. Build on the past; don’t try to reshape it.

For example, if you know a competitor who has been successful with pay-per-click advertising, research why they’ve been successful. Then, when you allocate your PPC budget, you can do so with confidence.

Prioritize Strategies

Now that you’ve looked to what you’ve done and what your competitors have done, assign a priority number to each strategy. Some strategies you might include in your budget plan for digital marketing include:

• blogging
• social media
• PPC advertising

These can have subsections. For example, social media might be divvied up by network or tactic, such as building awareness around a new hashtag or engaging in influencer marketing.

By going through this step, you’ll decide which of the strategies and tactics you’re already using are the most important for your brand. Resist the urge to assign budget amounts at this time.

Invite Innovation

Now that you’ve looked to see what you’ve done in the past and what your competitors have done, the time has come to look for ways you can take the next step.

This might include starting live streaming videos, creating a profile on a new social media network, or adding a new type of content to your content marketing stream.

It may require research to determine how long the innovations you want to employ will take, as well as the cost of employee time and any necessary tools.

For example, when Instagram was new, it was only possible to post to it from a smartphone. If your organization didn’t have access to a smartphone, that would have been a tool necessary to start using Instagram. The cost of the phone and any associated costs would have to be accounted for in the budget.

Assign Prices

Now you’re going to take your budget for marketing online and assign amounts to the strategies and tactics you plan to implement. This is the step that will actually give you your budget.

Make sure that whatever percentage of revenue you’ve designated for digital marketing efforts is an amount you stick to. If you feel like you don’t have enough money to devote, return to the prioritization step and rearrange which elements are most important.

Remember that the goal of setting a marketing budget and creating a plan is to increase your revenue, so if your budget is smaller than you’d like right now, you’re going to be taking steps to increase your revenue, so your budget for digital marketing should increase with time, too.

Measure, Measure, Measure

Your budget and plan for marketing online may change every year. Imagine how difficult it’d be to create this plan if you had no idea how successful your efforts were.

Now imagine the opposite: you track your results so when it comes time to revisit your plan and budget, you have data you can rely on. That data will help you make informed decisions when the time comes to revisit your budget allocations.

Go Market Your Brand

Now that you know the steps it takes to create a marketing budget plan that serves your brand instead of breaking the bank, you’re armed with the knowledge you need to figure out how to allocate funds to make yourself stand out online.

Sometimes though, even with the best-laid plans, the results might not turn out as hoped. When this happens, what’s important is to figure out why the strategies and tactics aren’t turning out the way you planned.

Should you find yourself in this situation, a helping hand can help too. That’s why we’re here to help. If you’ve got questions, reach out because we can’t wait to hear about your project.

We’ll do our best to get your digital marketing back on track while staying on budget.

 

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