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Marketing budgets vary drastically by industry and there’s no one single formula to perfect budgeting. Even within the same industry, each business has its own nuisances—like company structure, goals, and customer journey (also known as the sales and marketing funnel). This doesn’t even include the one-off events and ideas that come up halfway through the year or the fourth quarter blitz many businesses perform surrounding the holidays.
Allocating your budget in the wrong places will lead to spending too much in certain areas and potentially running out of funds. Setting your budget too low will lead to poor results and a likely poor return on investment (ROI). The bottom line is, there’s no perfect system or cookie cutter template for a marketing budget that can apply to everyone.
In order to set the right budget and use it effectively, you need to:
Keep reading to dig a little deeper into the three steps above.
(Curious how much you should be budgeting? Check out our marketing budget calculator.)
A marketing budget is an estimate of costs related to marketing your products or services. A typical marketing budget takes into account all overhead marketing costs (ex: software, salaries for marketing employees, cost of office space). However, much of the budget is concerned with actual marketing communications and campaign efforts like public relations, website development and hosting, advertising, etc.
A marketing budget plan will help you put your marketing funds in the right place. When you know how much you can spend, you know how much you can put into each marketing strategy and channel. It allows you to determine which approaches work with your budget or if an outsourced digital marketing company’s packages fit within your budget. But before you create your marketing budget, there are a few foundational steps to take:
When you set your business’s goals, make sure they’re SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). You don’t want to set a goal like “increase sales.” It won’t give you a precise target to work towards and achieve. Instead, set a goal like “Increase sales by 20% by the end of the year.” This goal is easily measurable and gives your team something precise to achieve.
SMART goals will give you a concrete reference point when budgeting for marketing because all activities can be measured by milestones that work toward a specific revenue goal.
Perform a competitor analysis to see how your top competition performs online. While you’re at it, perform some market research and aggregate all the places your ideal customer hangs out online and plan how much it might cost to get your message and offer in front of them. You can even use some top-notch tools to get this information quickly and easily.
If you want to know how to prepare a marketing budget, start by establishing your external costs. You need to know the price tag attached to everything your company needs to succeed so you know how much you can allocate for marketing. Not only does it determine what services you can invest in, but it also helps you set a baseline for your ROI. Examples include:
Develop an idea of which strategies you want to use for your business when creating a marketing budget. When you know which strategies you want to invest in, you can determine how they will fit into your marketing budget plan. For example, do you want a robust content marketing plan that includes blogs and ebooks? What about email automation? Social media? Influencers? Be mindful not to try and do too many things at once, and always have a way to measure the strategy against the goals you set above.
Budgets are not unchangeable plans—they’re allotments you can tweak when you need to. Business changes throughout the year based on trends, seasonality, the economy, and other unpredictable factors. Budgets, like strategies, must be adjusted at any time.
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends small businesses (businesses with revenue less than 5 million) allocate between 7% and 8% of total revenue to marketing — assuming your business has margins in the range of 10-12 percent. The number goes up from there for smaller businesses.
The amount of revenue businesses typically allocate to marketing has increased steadily over the past 10 years, with average marketing percentage of revenue landing around 13% in 2021, compared to just 8% back in 2011.
Try out our marketing budget calculator and see how much you should be preparing for your marketing budget!
Want to talk to someone on our team about how to put that marketing budget to use? Just fill out the form below and we’ll reach out to connect.
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
We’re all full of uncertainty as we map out the next year, but you don’t have to worry about drowning in doubt. With a solid plan and strategy in place, you can do more than just tread water. You can swim past the competition.
With today’s rapidly changing business landscape, 2023 planning can feel paralyzing at worst and daunting at best. From rising inflation and operating costs, to employee retention and supply chain gaps—chances are you’re sitting down to plan for 2023 and finding yourself at a loss.
The good news is, planning for growth in 2023 doesn’t have to be overwhelming, stress provoking or confusing. With advice from the leading experts in business and marketing, you can equip yourself with the knowledge, tools and action steps to prepare yourself for an uncertain 2023 and position your business not just to tread water, but to swim faster and stronger than your bigger competitors.
What’s their secret? We’ll let them tell you. Our network of business and marketing leaders shared their top challenges and best tips on navigating uncertainty. Our experts will discuss the trends and provide a roadmap to grow in 2023.
Our Founder & CEO, Rajat Kapur and trusted industry CMOs Alan Gonsenhauser, Danielle Cantin and Jennifer Garcia who each bring 20+ years of business and marketing leadership, teach you:
As the Founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Raj strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.
Alan Gonsenhauser, Founder and Principal of Demand Revenue, is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.
Danielle Cantin is an award-winning creative, mentor, and strategic branding and marketing expert. She helps companies reconnect with the Soul of their Brand so they can uncover missing pieces and achieve the deeper brand alignment needed for ultimate profits and success. Honored with the Vanguard Award for Innovation in Communication and a Cannes honorable mention for her work with Mazda, Danielle is a lifelong seeker, bringing the highest tools and teachings to her clients so they can break through to the next level.
Jennifer Garcia, CEO of Red Bamboo Marketing, brings a wealth of industry experience and an entrepreneurial spirit to lead an agency that blends marketing strategy, technology and creativity to drive genuine growth for clients. In her most recent role as Director of Marketing for Visual Lease (SaaS financial services), she drove 150% ARR growth during her tenure. She recently partnered with &Marketing to offer Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership to growing businesses.
In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.
&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.
Whether your brand markets to products, services, & everything in between, knowing how to bridge the gap between you and your customer base is essential.
The easiest way to build that customer base is to use effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to help your clients find you.
If you want to grow your business, start with these simple tips around SEO for beginners.
The first and easiest step to effective SEO is identifying your target audience. In short, your unique target audience is the group of people you want to reach – your ideal web traffic.
When you start working on SEO for beginners, you may think, “Don’t I want as many people to see my website as possible?” In a way, that’s true! However, it’s essential to consider what you want the audience to take away from you once they get to know you.
Identifying your audience will help you answer what you want them to do with your content. For example, if your website is selling custom-made motorcycles, you already know several things about your audience:
Given this information, your branding and voice should match what your audience is looking for. While being genuine and honest is a tried and true business trait, connecting with your audience at their level is also important. This could mean:
Understanding your audience is a crucial step in SEO for beginners towards turning web traffic into clients.
Simply put, keywords are the short phrases or important terms that help your client base connect with your content.
While almost every SEO guide will suggest using keywords in your content, it may be difficult to know which keywords to use. A good rule of thumb is to imagine what your user is searching for on Google to find you.
For example, if you are marketing to customers looking to compare new roofing options, you might use phrases like:
Search engines are more likely to connect you with your customer base when your content matches their search criteria. As you advance your skills from SEO for beginners toward more advanced practices, you may consider using a keyword research tool like Semrush to analyze your web traffic and search engine trends.
When Googling “hotels near me,” you will likely see ads for sites like Expedia and Priceline at the top. While paid advertising is a tempting option to get your brand noticed, it won’t build your customer base sustainably.
In fact, 81% of all Google searches click on an organic search result vs. a paid advertisement.
Alternatively, you can naturally place your content in the hands of users by incorporating solid SEO practices for beginners. By tagging keywords and adding multimedia elements to your content, you’re targeting a client base already searching for you.
Add pizzazz to your content with multimedia and photos. Using a visual aid not only draws in your audience but helps improve SEO functionality as well.
However, it is essential to note that, while visuals are important to improving your content’s SEO factor, it is imperative that you use only common domain media to avoid copyright snags. Several websites offer free range photography, including:
More importantly, adding a multimedia element communicates your main message to your audience. Help your brand shine through by using a photo or two to highlight the tone of your content.
Hit a home run with your audience by giving them a way to respond to your content. Whether that means subscribing to an email newsletter, donating to a worthy cause, or enrolling in a service product, consumers want to engage with you.
Keep your writing “user friendly” and to the point to draw in your audience. Use short blocks of text. Vary your sentence structure. Shoot for listicles, bullet points, and numbered steps.
You don’t need to be an SEO pro to be effective at building your client base. Use these simple SEO for beginners steps to get started today. And if you decide you want to become an SEO pro, check out our eBook guide to simply successful SEO use.
Marketing Manager Dexter Burgess takes the lead on implementing new tactics and promoting change through data-driven strategies. Dex works hard at client relations through consistent communication and positive feedback, never settling until the customer is understood and happy.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
We’ve all seen paid search results, more than likely every day. Whether you want to make a purchase or not, when you type a search into Google, paid ads are almost always the first results you see. A challenge would be to find a search query that DOES NOT produce paid ads at the top of the results. It’s an excellent way for businesses of any type to attract new prospective customers when the organic results can’t pull in the traffic they want.
The options businesses can incorporate into a paid search strategy are limited only by the team’s creativity. Google is the most widely known and used, but don’t limit your thinking to just one approach (or search engine!). Below are some tips for implementing the most effective paid search strategy.
Don’t do anything until you spend time determining the following for your business:
Knowing these three critical pieces of information about your business will drive everything you do. Paid ads should improve the profitability of your business. No one wants to spend more money than they’re making, and your business should know what they’re willing to spend to gain new customers. Then, while running your paid strategy, you can quickly determine your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and whether or not the ads are paying off.
Before you decide how to attract new customers, you first need to know who your customers are and where they spend time online. This is the first step in driving your paid search strategy. If you don’t know who they are and what internet spaces they hang out in, you will likely make a mistake in choosing a paid strategy focus.
Google Ads is often the clear choice for a paid search investment. They handle over 3.8 million searches every minute with over 270 million unique visitors. More than likely, your prospects use Google for something. But are they using Google for what you need, and is it affordable? For eCommerce products, it’s frequently the right move. But other businesses may not want Google Ads as part of their strategy.
For example, showing ads for “personal injury lawyer” can easily cost over $100 per click (it’s a popular, therefore expensive term to target). Researching the cost of your keywords is an essential part of determining your strategy.
Google is undoubtedly the Goliath in the room. But there are many other platforms available, and your prospects may be there waiting to be enticed into your sales funnel. After researching your target audience, you can decide which platform makes the most sense. Here are just a few of the advertising platforms you can consider, depending on the demographics of your target audience:
If you sell fashion items to girls ages 13-25, TikTok may be a no-brainer, while LinkedIn would be an epic fail. If you sell IT services, LinkedIn has your customer, while Pinterest would be a swing and a miss for you.
No matter who you’re trying to reach, what your offer is, and the depth of your ad spend pockets, make sure you target the right people in the right places with the right message.
If you’re interested in knowing more about &Marketing’s approach to paid advertising as an outsourced marketing department, contact us and we’re happy to discuss your business goals and how ads can help you reach them.
&Marketing leverages the power of Business Intelligence to gain insights on paid search performance and help our clients make informed decisions. To learn more about our BI and analytics process, download our eBook below.
Marketing Director Sydney Thomas helps clients create, implement, and optimize campaigns in their Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts. While ensuring that clients are getting the most out of their pay-per-click accounts, she also supports creating websites to improve SEO and supports paid social network advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
This post was originally published at https://www.demandrevenue.com/cmos-what-kind-of-conductor-are-you-jazz-classical-or-both/.
Hopefully, as a CMO, you like an eclectic mix. Today’s CMOs need to be holistic conductors, balancing creativity with precision. You need a good balance of both to be really successful in today’s complex market. Let’s listen:
Being innovative and building strong connections with customers and prospects is like jazz. Remember Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis or Benny Goodman? Jazz requires expressing your creativity, using your gut, developing audacious breakthrough ideas, and taking risks to connect with target audiences in a really memorable way. They won’t remember numbers as much as how you made them feel. You won’t get big ideas from spreadsheets, either. Creativity requires you to:
Precision requires process, logic and consistent orchestration like the mathematically consistent phrasing in classical music. Remember Vivaldi, Bach or Handel? Over the last several years, digital and social media have enhanced the measurability of marketing’s impacts and value to the enterprise. Effective data analytics and process management are critical to lead efficiency and continuous improvement in today’s marketing organizations. To enable precision, you must:
So start making some beautiful jazz as well as classical music. Blending strong creativity with precision makes you a better marketer. It’s impossible to quantify creativity except in the rear-view mirror. And you can’t run an efficient marketing operation without the precision that data analytics and technology afford. Balancing both makes marketing far more interesting, effective and fun.
Alan Gonsenhauser, Founder and Principal of Demand Revenue, is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
With detailed market intelligence and a solid content strategy, you can compete with your Goliath competitors for your buyers’ attention without spending all of your marketing budget on Google ads.
75% of people don’t click beyond the first page of Google when they search for help or answers online. Your larger competitors are ranking first and second organically and have the biggest share of voice online. On top of that, it’s likely the content you are creating isn’t answering the questions or solving the problems your buyers and customers are experiencing.
These obstacles are preventing you from beating those competitors and getting your target customers to visit your site and see your offers instead might feel insurmountable (especially without paying for ads so you can skip the line).
The good news is, it is possible to level the playing field with strong SEO and content marketing, grounded in solid research.
Watch Founder & CEO, Rajat Kapur as he hosts our Head of Business Intelligence & Analytics, Paul Ferguson, and our Director of Content, Beth McDonough, for a jam-packed, interactive webinar. You will learn how to:
We have applied these methods to clients across industries and seen success:
As the Founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Raj strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
As the Director of Content for &Marketing, Beth focuses on helping brands grow their business through personality driven, value-centric messaging and data-infused copywriting. The content department at &Marketing leverages SEO, analytics, proven marketing strategy, and compelling storytelling tactics to build brand awareness, attract, and convert new customers.
In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.
&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.
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