With an endless number of marketing tactics and avenues, tools, and software from which to choose, how does your marketing team decide which ones to utilize? Here are a few of the different options you have, and some tips on how to best break down your marketing budget to increase marketing effectiveness for your company.
1. Social Media Marketing
First things first, you want to set aside a portion of your marketing budget for your social media presence. This includes content creation, community management, and of course, social media advertising. Your advertising budget and advertising management will certainly be the largest part of your overall social media budget, but it’s important to note the cost of certain content creation and community management tools that businesses need to properly communicate and engage with their online audience as well.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is much more than “just a blog.” A content marketing budget requires funds for freelance writers (unless your team has staff writers), design software for PDFs, handouts, webinar slides, landing page hosting software, and more.
This is also where search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) live. It’s important to do marketing research to know which keywords you need to utilize, which pages you need to send customers to, and how much you need to spend on your search ads.
3. Website
If your business doesn’t have a website, this is the first budget item on your list. Even if your company does have a website, some budget should still be allotted for website updates or potential website redesigns if the company goes through a rebrand or if the site design is simply outdated.
A company’s website is its home base, and it can also be used for powerful lead generation. Tools like OptinMonster, Drift, ScheduleOnce and more can be utilized to gather even more leads than websites without them.
4. Data and Analytics
Your marketing is nothing if you don’t have some way to track analytics and create reports on your performance. Some kind of marketing database software and other analytics tools should be included in your marketing budget. This way, you’re able to keep track of leads and customer data to help close more sales and target the right customers. Analytics software also helps you to track your performance and adapt any campaigns that aren’t working so that your ROI increases and the business makes more money.
Every company’s marketing budget allotment is going to look different. Have your marketing team get together and put together a strategy that works for your company.
The original version of this article was first published on ReachForce.
Kristi Bjornaas is an experienced, data-driven marketer who leads the marketing strategy and execution for ReachForce. Inspired by helping B2B marketers increase their contribution to the pipeline by using data as their guiding principle, Kristi integrates her expertise across marketing automation platforms, content strategy, sales enablement, customer community programs as well as all domains of the digital marketing realm.
