Unless you have access to unlimited capital, you’re going to need to create budgets for your business. Your marketing budget is critical to the success of your business. Without marketing, you don’t have any way of reaching your target market.
While marketing is critical for any business model, it doesn’t have to drain your company’s bank account. A clever budgeting strategy can help you save money on your marketing, bolstering cash flow to your business.
Do You Know Your Sales Cycle?
The sales funnel encompasses the defining factor concerning where your prospects convert and become paying customers. Every sales funnel has four stages.
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Action
Understanding your sales funnel helps you identify weak points in the model where you need to use a marketing strategy to bolster results. For instance, it’s common for prospects to exit the funnel at the consideration stage.
Implementing marketing strategies for retaining traffic and prospects at this stage will improve your conversions. Identify these weak points and allocate funds to marketing strategies to improve your results in prospect retention and conversion.
Understand Costs
To build a marketing budget, you’ll need to understand your costing model. Make sure you have a thorough understanding of the ongoing costs for the following areas of your business.
- Operational and running costs.
- Employee costs.
- Logistics.
After you understand these costs, you can allocate the balance to your marketing budget. This strategy prevents you from overextending your marketing budget, mitigating financial risk to the company.
Many companies end up failing because they don’t complete this basic exercise. Fail to plan, and you plan to fail.
Create Achievable Goals and Track Your Metrics
When planning your marketing budget, you’ll need to align it with your business goals and objectives. You’ll need to know what you want to achieve from your business to set your marketing budget. Set goals and targets for the following
- Increasing earnings.
- Generating new leads.
- Increasing your subscribers and followers.
- Building brand awareness.
Make sure your business goals are specific and measure your progress by tracking your metrics. Google Analytics has plenty of free tools to help you track your prospecting and conversion metrics.
Set goals that are realistic. For instance, we will increase sales by 5% in the first quarter of 2022. Your goal should be achievable, but just barely out of reach, so you have to stretch to make it a reality.
