Regardless of whether you own a small business or are the managing director of a multi-million dollar corporation, marketing is vital to the growth and profitably of your business. The problem is, many businesses still don’t allocate adequate resources to marketing, or even worse, spend their marketing budget haphazardly.
Many businesses, particularly start-up business, make the mistake of limiting their marketing budget plan to costs for tangible items like print advertisements, mail outs, printing of collateral or fees for a public relations consultancy. A true marketing budget plan includes the other ‘hidden’ costs like man-hours for planning, monitoring and tracking of marketing campaigns.
We’ve come up with some step-by-step instructions on how to put together your next marketing budget plan.
Step 1: Put together a really comprehensive list of all the different components of your marketing campaign. Make sure you include all those ‘hidden’ costs like research, testing, and monitoring.
Step 2: Roughly estimate the costs of compiling market research. This might include conducting surveys, purchasing industry research and even contracting an external consultancy firm.
Step 3: Roughly estimate what costs would be for different marketing strategies. Include a few different strategies. Maybe you want to try giveaways, or maybe you want manufacture different versions of your product for different markets.
Step 4: Roughly estimate the costs associated with any communications components that might be involved. Think advertisements, direct mail, website development, contests and other promotions.
Step 5: Allocate some funds for monitoring in your marketing budget plan. These funds might go towards customer surveys or website statistics software.
Step 6: Add up all your rough estimates. If the total amount exceeds your budget, you might have to go back to the drawing board. Review each section. See what can be cut back. Maybe you don’t need TV and radio advertisements. Maybe you could try pay-per-click ads instead.
If, like me, you’re good with words, but not so crash hot on numbers, Microsoft has a couple of free, downloadable marketing budget plan templates.
Sally has worked in marketing, communications, and PR for over 15 years. She is the Chief Wordsmith at Wordly: a copywriting and content marketing agency that works predominantly with WordPress powered websites.
