In this digital age, the importance of marketing is massive. Being able to reach and impact individuals across the globe will be a huge driver of your business’s continued success. In order for your business to continue to grow and develop, it’s critical that you’re expanding your market to reach new people and clients who are willing to pay for your services. If you’re looking to decide how your marketing budget should be allocated, follow along for some impactful considerations and tips.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is essentially how you attract new customers or clients to your business. This requires research, planning, feedback, and evaluation to execute successfully. Your marketing plan can contain earned, owned, and paid media. An example of earned media would be if a journalist wanted to write a profile on your business. Whereas, owned media is any media you own, like a website. Paid would be advertisements or any other type of paid media, like influencer marketing. Utilizing a combination of these will make up a well-executed marketing plan. You’ll want to research growing trends and popular platforms for your target demographic, and find the best form of media to reach them and ultimately convert them into a customer.
What Does Your Marketing Budget Contain?
Your marketing budget should contain a variety of tools used to enhance your overall marketing plan. First and most importantly, it’ll include any person who’s running your marketing plans. As a sole proprietor, include room in your budget for consultants and freelance artists to help guide you and help you accomplish any additional workload you need covered. As a growing business, hiring a full-time marketing position isn’t necessary to get your marketing plan up and running. Instead, work with professionals and consultants who will point you in the right direction to then execute your plan.
The remainder of your budget will be allocated to researching and placing media in front of your target audience. There could be a plethora of places you could use this marketing budget, such as physical or digital spaces. Your media budget could also go towards the tools one would use to create marketing materials, such as Constant Contact or a Canva subscription. It’s best to leave a little extra room in your budget when planning at the beginning of the year or even the quarter because of how quickly new marketing trends emerge. You’ll want a little bit of leeway to adjust your plans to adapt to these trends and ensure your business stays relevant.
How to Secure Funding
For new businesses just getting started, a marketing plan is an important roadmap to your success and can help identify areas for improvement. That being said, as a newer business with less revenue to go around, you have to consider the best ways to spend and allocate your money. There may not be extra revenue that can be put back into the business for greater development just yet, but starting a plan early on can help you navigate these early stages.
Some small businesses will have investors put up the money for their start-up costs, including a marketing budget, in exchange for a percentage of opinion on the development of the company. For those businesses that don’t have investors, they’ll need to find funding from other sources, which could include a small business loan or a home equity loan. Both of these would supply a suitable cash flow for the business to manage until there’s a steady stream of revenue to reinvest into the marketing plan. Business owners may choose to use a home equity loan because it’s a lump sum of cash and is offered at better rates than other loans, whereas small business loans can often be tricky for startups to qualify for. All this can be advantageous when getting a business off the ground. Once your business starts to gain more traction, you can quickly and easily pay off your loan and put your finances towards more investments.
For more information on how to best utilize your marketing budget, book an appointment for us to discuss how your budget can better work for your business. Each business is different and needs different strategies in order to find its best success.