While technically it is not necessary to create a marketing budget, not creating one can impact your small business more than you think.
Budgeting your marketing allows you to track your return on investment for all the initiatives throughout the year, keeps your spending in check with what you have available, and allows you to gauge how well you did with your marketing throughout the year. Additionally, understanding how much you are spending currently for your marketing can help you plan your marketing strategy for the next year.
Creating a marketing budget may seem daunting, but it is a simple 4 step process.
Lists: When creating your budget, you first want to begin with listing your marketing initiatives. List out all the initiatives you are looking to try (i.e. social media ads) for the coming year. Keep in mind that some initiatives might include additional costs that you may not automatically consider, but will still need to be budgeted for.
Timeline: You will need to decide when to launch each initiative. This includes not only the month in which the initiative begins, but also how long (i.e. one month or several months) each will run for.
Yearly Spend: How much are you going to spend for the entire year on marketing? Do not think about each initiative just yet, but simply the year as a whole. It is important to keep in mind what is suitable for your business and industry.
Divide and Conquer: You have the total amount of money to be spent, now you can disperse the money among the initiatives you have planned! Visualizing can help you with this process, so do not hesitate to create a timeline or chart on a document.
Looking for a more in depth walk through on planning a marketing budget? Check out our YouTube video!
Did you find this content useful? Feel free to share your thoughts with me, I can be reached at vivian@theseasonedmarketer.com or just leave me a comment below!
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