Managing a department’s resources is always a task that is full of challenges, and even more so when speaking about product marketing and the actions to undertake depend on seasonality and variations in demand.
The marketing department must draft the marketing plan budget far enough in advance, but it also must provide a margin for changes and adaptations that can be requested with no prior notice. And, now more than ever before, it is very important to have control over where your resources are going and be able to adjust them to new circumstances.
A marketing budget includes all the areas in which the business is going to invest money to be able to put into motion the sales and promotion projects – generally quarterly. More than in other departments, a marketing plan can take up many resources over various channels; therefore, it is essential to define your resources well from the start and avoid undesired extra costs.
A digital marketing budget template should align with the SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-Focused, and Timebound. It should also be flexible. As always, the challenge is to optimize expenses to achieve the best possible results.
Every company may have its expenditure broken down in a different way. The marketing director has to decide what line items will be for each area/action and assess the results to be able to consider adjustments and changes if a campaign or strategy does not work.
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Five areas seem easy to control in an example of a marketing plan budget. Even so, things can get more complicated when we stop to review all the intricacies that may crop up with so many personnel, advertising, and technology resources.
That extra cost to register a domain name. Translation of a website copy to Taiwanese. A consultant that identified the best colors for your brand identity.
Dozens of small tasks can end up representing a significant expense. Therefore, the marketing department must group the foreseen tasks for each element correctly:
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While there is no universal digital marketing budget example, take note of the following tips to improve the results of your quarterly activities.
This means undertaking an analysis of the markets that you operate on and the competitive environment, in addition to studying your target audience, their needs, concerns, and buying cycle. In addition to helping you to make your marketing campaigns more fruitful, this information will be a great help for your sales team.
To be able to characterize each target audience, it is important to do research through interviews, surveys, and group activities like roundtable discussions and product testing.
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The content is still the king of marketing, so much so that a report by Semrush indicated that 91% of companies do some type of content marketing.
Don’t forget that creating and distributing quality content that is of value for your target audience is a very useful way to ensure that your first encounter with a user is a successful one. You’ll have more chances of that user becoming loyal to your brand and this will allow you to position yourself as an expert leader in your sector.
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Any marketing team has times of true panic when they have to launch new collections, update products on a website, and create catalogs for the next season. Your product information can end up being out of date and lost amongst thousands of folders and Excel files.
To solve this problems, the best companies are already beginning to discover the usefulness of automation technology. A Product Information Management (PIM) tool helps you to have all your product contents under control and organized in a single place, in the cloud, accessible from anywhere and in real time.
This software is a luxury within the reach of companies of any size to improve communication between departments, members of the marketing team, international branches. In fact, PIM solutions are created with marketing departments in mind.
Having a good idea of what your competition is doing is essential to helping you determine what to do, how, where, and with what resources. This will help you to ensure that you won’t lose your competitive edge at any time.
And even more important than paying attention to the numbers is to pay attention to the quality of the actions undertaken by your competitors. What do their clients complain about? Is there anything lacking that you can contribute with in the niche? What actions that you can imitate have given good results for your competitors? How can you stop being just ‘one more’ in the crowd and stand out?
As you know, Google is always updating. Some updates benefit you and others... not so much. In fact, they can make your site traffic plummet.
That’s why it’s very important to have or hire a SEO service. This will help you to guarantee that your website is always ready, up to date, and optimized to be amongst the first results in the search engines and attract organic traffic.
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Depicting effort to online marketing activities on social networks and in search engines is no longer just an option... it is something fundamental! Social media traffic (and social commerce) is one of the main traffic sources that a website can have, in addition to an excellent way to gain potential clients.
Joining forces with collaborators to promote your products by means of influencers or on specialized channels for your sector is increasingly more important for a digital marketing plan. Listening to and reading the comments of your potential audience on the social networks also provides very valuable data in terms of trends and what customers value when purchasing a product or trying a new brand.
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While in this day and age the majority of the budget is probably for online activities, you should not forget about this offline part. If you wish to get greater brand recognition or release new products or collections, you should think about organizing industry events or participating in events organized by others.
These activities are quite expensive, but you will get to appear in the main media outlets and leading magazines for your sector, in addition to attracting potential clients.
What’s more, this branch of marketing is currently leaning towards the digital environment as well. There are increasingly more online events being held like webinars, seminars, and workshops – and these can be open or paid events. They are much less expensive to organize and will allow you to create ties with other allies from your industry while attracting mentions on social networks.
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You are ready to begin to hash out your budget for a digital marketing plan, and we can support you with a tool that will be most useful to you: a PIM solution that you can use for free for 30 days to better organize your team and product marketing resources.