How to Manage a Marketing Budget

Most companies wonder: What is the best marketing strategy to adopt? Should it be offline or online, to attract as many qualified customers as possible? How do we build a loyal relationship between your company and its customers? Which marketing software will help with this approach?

Back to the basics

It is the time for a quick throwback! Let’s have a look the predecessor of digital marketing: traditional marketing. Back in these old school-days, with traditional marketing we were facing a unilateral and unidirectional advertiser/target relationship. Information and ads, were sent to people whether they were interested in the company’s brands or products or not. Clearly, it was a mass marketing strategy, costs a lot. Marketing budget is often established within an Excel file with complex formulas: estimation of the return of investment, the profit etc.

Why? Simply because the company broadcasts a generic message to a maximum of prospects hoping to reach them and influence them, so that they opt for the company’s products or services.

Traditional marketing is not dead: it still has its place in a company’s marketing strategy. However, today it must be associated with and complementary to digital marketing, in order to optimize the results and the investment.

Among its many benefits, the main advantage of digital marketing is the swiftness of action.

Especially when the company’s message can be shared via social networks, it is much faster than traditional communication.

This explains why digital marketing is often qualified as “viral”. Using social networks to increase your customers’ portfolio also allows you to have personalized exchanges with current and potential clients (with online surveys, opinions, comments and other customized communication).

The opinions of these individuals can be very useful for the improvement of your products or services and helps to attract other prospects.

Manage your marketing budget with this template

Marketing Budgets: How to Spread Them?

Marketing expenses has been growing for many years now. The explanation?  The evolution of the perception of marketing within companies has changed massively. Indeed, this lever is no longer considered to be a background element,  but an essential one and that has become a real growth vector.

But beware: today’s economic, market requires a special approach to targeting potential future customers.

Indeed, targeting now takes into account the prospect’s real needs and issues.  That is the noticeable difference between online marketing campaigns and traditional campaigns.

Interestingly, some businesses prefer to switch to traditional marketing, dedicating their marketing budget to trade shows, exhibitions and  telemarketing . But, most of these companies also spend in digital marketing.

Establish a Digital Marketing Budget 

When a marketing project manager thinks about a marketing budget plan, it usually concentrates its investments in the elements:

• Email marketing
• Mobile apps
• Website design
• Improvement of the website’s performance
• Lead management
• SEO

With digital, companies now have effective ways to communicate with prospects while spending less than they would on traditional marketing. Today, you need to find the best combination of offline and online tactics that attract, motivate, and convince your prospects at every step of the prospect cycle. You will have to allocate your budget resources in the most optimal way. To learn more, discover the ideal marketing strategy to follow within a business and the best marketing plan to adopt.