Marketing is an essential part of running a successful business today. Overspending or underspending on a digital marketing budget can be detrimental to your brand, and finding the sweet spot can take some work.

One of the best ways to make sure your marketing efforts aren’t wasted is to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy with a well-defined plan. Knowing the best steps to craft a business marketing budget can take your plan from good to great.

4 Steps to Developing a Marketing Budget for Your Business

Establish your sales cycle. Your sales funnel is a crucial part of your budget since it determines where to put your attending and funding. A typical sales funnel has four stages:

1. Awareness: This is when your audience realizes they have a need and start researching solutions.
2. Consideration: One step further, your audience is now knee-deep in options and is seeing what works for them.
3. Decision: At this stage, potential clients narrow their focus on just a few options to consider.
4. Action: To take action, leads choose your product or service and become clients.

If you know many potential customers are reaching the decision stage but not taking action, focus on driving to that final move. Prioritizing customer education and brand awareness could be best if your customers don’t make it beyond the consideration phase.

Determine business goals. To make the best roadmap, you need to know the final destination. Whether you are looking to earn more sales, increase your leads, gain more followers, or strengthen brand reputation, each path can lead to different marketing strategies for the best results. Also, make your goals specific, such as “gain 10% more subscribers in 6 months” or “increase lead generation by 5% this quarter.”

Study your options. Digital marketing has numerous strategies to take advantage of, but not every business needs to focus on every option. The most common digital marketing strategies include content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, paid advertisements, and social media marketing. Knowing the potential costs of your digital marketing strategy options can help you plan where to start.

Know your costs. Once you calculate your external business costs, like operational, staffing, utilities, and annual expenses, it is easy to see what your business can afford for a digital marketing strategy. Setting a baseline for your ROI will help guide your strategies for the best returns for your business.

What is the Average Marketing Budget for a Business?

There is no dollar amount that every small business or large corporation targets. Instead, the best plan for building a business marketing budget is to work backward from your annual budget.

On average, businesses spend anywhere from 9% to 12% of their annual budget on a digital marketing strategy. However, some small businesses spend as little as 2% of their budget on marketing and do as much in-house as they can.

Focusing on a percentage instead of a hard dollar amount allows your budget to grow with your business without fighting for resources.

Another popular strategy for choosing a marketing budget is basing your spend on your competition. This assumes other companies in your industry are savvier in marketing, which may not be the case. Plus, a small business trying to compete with a larger company could waste your money and, ultimately, put you out of business.

When planning a new digital strategy, your best plan of attack is working with a third-party marketing company who can dive in and give you the best bang for your buck while letting you focus on your passion.

Contact Us Today

The techniques, services, and methods we use to help our clients achieve success are the same we use to market our own services. When you partner with CC&A, you can count on having an established, forward-looking team at your back to help you meet your goals. We can help you build the strategy you need to get to the next level. Contact us today for more information.