How to decide your digital marketing budget in 2022?

Early in 2020, when the pandemic hit, many companies ended up slashing their marketing budget as they were not sure whether customers were going to buy products in the middle of a global pandemic. While that was completely understandable, what’s interesting is that most companies have still not recovered from the shock of the pandemic and are unsure about how to go about deciding their marketing budget. Now that the third wave is approaching, it is important to understand how you can decide your marketing budget so that you can ensure your brand gets the exposure you need. Before you contact a digital marketing agency, you must identify the budget for the different marketing services.

What does the term marketing budget mean?

In simple words, marketing budgets refer to a plan that outlines how much you are planning to spend on marketing services for a month, a quarter, and a year. So, when you’re making your digital marketing budget, you will need to make a list of all the digital marketing services that you are going to need, along with the amount that you are planning to spend on each. For instance, some of the services that you can highlight on your document are PPC, SEO, SMM, website development, graphic design, and so on. Then create three columns and write down what you want to spend in a month, over a quarter, and over a year.

There are a few other things that you will have to keep in mind while creating your budget. These are as follows:

- Sales Funnel: A Sales Funnel is basically an outline of the process that your potential customer has to go through before they are convinced about your product or services and become a customer. Many people also call this the buyer journey. When you write down the estimated buyer journey, you can then figure out which services you will need in order to get a customer to make a purchase. Based on that, you can write down the services you will need.

- List out your external costs: Before you decide what you want to spend on any services, you need to be clear about how much you are already spending on keeping your business running. There are many different operational expenses that eat into your profits, so it’s important to write them down and be very clear about the money that’s being drained out. A few things that you may pen down are:

- Employee-related expenses such as the cost of salaries, equipment bought to help employees do their jobs, cost of hiring, and so on.

- Costs related to creating your product, such as manufacturing costs, electricity bills, equipment maintenance, and so on.

- Any rent expenses, loans you may have taken out, etc

- Random expenses on office equipment such as fixing chairs, sponsoring team lunches, and so on.

- Understand your objectives: The digital marketing services that you will need will depend a lot on your business goals. For instance, lead generation, sales, more brand awareness, and so on. Once you have understood the objectives, you will be able to prioritize different line items in your marketing plan and decide the budget accordingly.

- Get in touch with a digital marketing agency: Once you have decided the basics, you can get in touch with a digital marketing agency as they can then help you decide what services are needed based on your target audience.

Finding the right experts does not have to be very difficult. All you need to know is that constant learning is very important as digital marketing is a dynamic industry.