How to Create a Marketing Budget That Works

No matter if you are in charge of a multinational corporation, or a small business of three employees, marketing is critical to your continued profitability and growth. However, for many businesses, knowing how to allocate money to this effect, and avoiding spending it haphazardly, can be a major struggle. Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating and using your full service marketing budget.

Calculating Your Budget

When creating a budget, many businesses start with a certain percentage of actual or projected revenues as a base point. Usually this percentage is around 2-3% for an established business, or 3-5% for a new business where getting your brand and message out there is more important for establishing a base. If you are a small business with less than $5MM in revenue, you might consider a larger percentage for your marketing budget, as high as 8%.

Allocating Your Budget

Once you have decided on a sustainable portion of your revenue to be allocated to marketing, it should be split between two components. The first brand development, includes any channels used to promote the brand, like blogs, websites, a sales team, and public relations. The other half of the budget should be spent on actually promoting your message through advertising, campaigns, and special events.

Spending Your Budget

Perhaps more important than how much you spend, is how you spend it. This means you should have a plan in place that outlines exactly where every dollar will go. Every expense should be tied to an action that directly impacts your goal, and should indicate under what timeframe this will occur.

Track Data and Re-Plan

While it is easy to create a plan, sticking to that plan may not be as easy. Unexpected expenses have a tendency to crop up. You may receive unexpected discounts on ads or creative labor, or any other number of things may happen to throw off your budget. Do not stress about this, but instead, simply track the information, and adapt your next quarter or year’s budget accordingly.

You can speak with a full service marketing agency today to discuss how you can get the most out of every marketing dollar. Simply go to www.ScreamerCo.com now!