In the extremely apt words of Dave Ramsey, “A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went”
Before arriving at the Digital Marketing budgets, one must need to be clear what one is trying to achieve for the company. The more aggressive the goal that the company is trying to achieve the more will be the budget. A budget helps in making a company more strategy oriented. You avoid making impulsive decisions and stick to a certain plan which lies in accordance with your budget.
According to statistical data, 30% of small businesses say that their digital marketing sales will increase considerably. The importance of marketing should be realised because the sales and profit depend upon it. Marketing is the salesman of your product. In order to validate the budget, a typical return on investment(RoI) could be done to establish the viability of the above. This could be done by quantifying the returns which is expected and how that compares against the investment made. For this, you would need to analyse your past record and figure out what worked and what didn’t and invest in areas of high return amd cut on the expenses. This helps in the preparation of an accurate budget. Knowing what worked and what didn’t, and, most importantly, why there was success or failure are vital pieces of the digital marketing puzzle that you’ll need if you want to move forward with your next effort.
The next is one of the biggest component which includes Design & layout, Graphics, visuals, Videography etc. This has to be done using the corporate guidelines and also keeping in mind the target audience. Majorly, for the service sectors, articles and blogs are still used extensively. In the case, a need for writing experts arises. On the other hand, businesses that are more product-based might benefit more from video content. That, of course, is an entirely different skill set, despite the importance of the content itself. So, budgeting would need to account for various other factors that are required in order to make a video.
Then one should look into which social segment are we targeting and which channel ( Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat etc) is more suitable to market your product or services. There are different tools and apps which can help determine the budgets based on the above criteria. Again, the platform that we select depends entirely upon the type of product/service that we are selling. If you’re more of a business-business enterprise you might want to design a budget which would include the costing of creating a sole website that gives details about your business and other factors related to that; but if you;re dealing in the sale and purchase of goods, platforms like social media and influencer marketing would also be highly advisable. This again, changes your budget.
Lastly, you should also look into investing in a good alaytics software that would be able to monitor your results accurately and hence, help you in making minor changes as when required. It also helps you to develop an optimsed and effective budget, which is an asset to the company.
