A successful marketing strategy involves many moving parts but one of the first things you need to think about is your marketing budget. Planning out your marketing goals and how much you need to achieve them helps you’ll need for the different activities that make up your marketing strategy. This ensures there are no financial surprises in the future!
But what activities do you include in your budget? These can include social media strategy, paid advertising, and marketing and staff or consultants. Your marketing plan will largely depend on how big your budget needs to be and unfortunately, there’s the no-size-fits-all answer. But don’t worry – here’s how to decide where to invest your marketing budget in 2023:
Define your goals
Knowing what you’re wanting from your marketing plan helps you decide how large your budget needs to be and where you need to apply it. Do your goals involve increasing organic traffic on your websites? Or maybe you want to boost one of your best or worst-performing channels?
Whatever your goals are, defining them can help you calculate prices and pick strategies that are going to best benefit your business. It can also help give you a rough timeframe on how long they’ll take to be completed.
Identify the biggest opportunities
Knowing areas where you can level up your business can help double your profits so identifying the biggest opportunities can only help you in the long run. Maybe your website has some untapped potential or you’re trying to get a strong foothold in the digital market. In either case, taking advantage of these gaps will be great for business.
If you’re unsure where to start or you’re wanting a total overhaul, you should consider seeking the services of a specialist search marketing agency to receive professional advice on what opportunities are best for your company.
Know your strengths and weaknesses
Knowing the areas where your marketing strategy is performing and where improvement is needed can help you perfect it. Knowing where your marketing strategy needs more work can help you establish where funds need to be allocated.
If you’re struggling to identify any strengths and weaknesses yourself, undergoing a SWOT analysis can improve your competitive position. Not only can they help improve how your company is performing today but in the next weeks, months, and even years.
Analyse your competitors
Understanding where your competitors stand in your market and researching their market strategies is a great way to improve your own. This information can be used as a point of comparison to help you establish a model of success by studying well-established companies in your industry.
Conducting a competitor analysis is a convenient way to set benchmarks for your company’s future growth by providing a reference point. Researching competitors can also give you an idea of how other companies can threaten business in the future.
Where did you waste money
There may be areas in your marketing strategy where you’re wasting money unnecessarily and identifying these can help you adjust your budget in the future. You can highlight marketing areas where you’re overspending and drop any dead weight that’s constraining your budget. Any money that is freed up can then be reallocated to something more useful.
For example, maybe you invested too much in social media strategy when you should have been focusing on paid advertising. In this case, it would make sense to cut the wasted funds and apply them elsewhere. The result is that you make the most out of your budget and there’s the potential for your company’s performance to improve.
