Building a successful company almost always involves successfully marketing your products, services or brand/s. One of the best ways to make sure that your marketing money is being well spent is to develop a comprehensive and structured marketing strategy in advance.. Following a well-defined plan will help ensure you are spending your marketing funds wisely and in turn ensuring a higher positive return on investment.
There are a few important steps you need to do before you start mapping out your budget, these steps are necessary to informing how you spend your budget:
- Know your sales funnel
The purchase funnel is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of goods or services. Building an effective marketing budget requires you to take a deep dive into knowing your funnel, where you’ll track results throughout the revenue cycle, from prospect to customer. Things to think about are how many leads, conversions and sales your business obtains per month. This will influence your strategy, planning and budget.
- Strategize
Creating a structured strategy, based on your business knowledge is key to success. A marketing strategy looks at all of the areas of your selling activities and helps each one support the next. Understanding how to create an integrated marketing strategy will help you make better decisions regarding specific marketing tactics. Your strategy should include your goals, objectives, defined target audience, a SWOT analysis and a competitor analysis. If you need assistance in writing your business strategy, talk to your Hurley’s Media Sales Representative, we’re here to help.
- Plan
Your plan contains all the marketing and advertising tactics (what you’re actually going to do) as well as the strategic timing in which you will promote different products or campaigns. This should be influenced by your goals and objectives and demonstrate how you are going to achieve them.
- Budget
Finally, now is the time to set your marketing and advertising budget, based on your strategy and plan. All the elements that go into your budget should be based on what you need to reach your target audience and create growth for your business. Some tactics you should consider are:
- Radio
- Television
- Cinema
- Website development
- Online marketing
- Social media management
- Creative design
- Events
- Direct marketing
- Email marketing
- Print advertising
- Publicity
- Telemarketing
Remember, your marketing budget should be treated as an investment, something that will bring a quantifiable and ascertainable return on investment over time.
If you don’t know where to start with your budget or you’re unsure how to allocate your spend, talk to your Hurley’s Media Sales Representative. We’ll help you strategize where your spend should be prioritized and how you can stretch your budget. Email [email protected]
