[Digital Marketing Budget] How to Plan Your Digital Marketing Activities

With unlimited ways to spend your marketing dollars, planning your digital marketing budget in this modern day age of the digital world can be a struggle for many brands and marketing professionals.

Risking your money, fear of over-allocating your budget on the wrong channels or under-allocating the best channels and miss the valuable platforms to spend on, there are hundreds of thoughts in the mind of a digital marketer when he plans his Digital marketing budget.

So, what are the best and effective strategies to plan your digital marketing budget?

In this article, we will walk you to the answers to all your questions. Let’s get started!

1. Set up your Marketing goals

The first step to plan your digital marketing budget is to pick the right direction and set your goals. Before you start spending money on the digital activities of your business, you must be clear about the goals of your business.

Decide where you want to see your digital marketing results. Want to build your brand awareness of your business this year or want to increase your customers? Are you a business with a goal of doubling your email list this year?

Whatever it may be, but be specific about your digital marketing goals before spending. Remember! Your goals will translate into your digital marketing budget by the ways you spend on these goals. So, set up your marketing goals first.

2. Analyze your past efforts

Analyze and learn from your past experiences what has worked well and what has not. Which strategies were most successful for your business and which were not?

Knowing your success and failure points are vital for planning your digital marketing budget. Whether you measure retweets, your email subscribers list, or any lead generated, conduct thorough research on all these marketing activities and determine which works best for you.

Set some money aside for testing new strategies and experimenting on new things. Whatever method you choose to divide you’re spending, don’t throw your money on ineffective channels.

3. Research Current Industry Trends

Stay updated with the current industry trends. Although you don’t need to copy your competitor’s marketing strategies, you must have an eye on their strategies and what they are doing to grow their business.

There are various tools like SEMRush, Google Analytics to analyze your competitor’s website. Use these tools and have some idea of recent industry trends.

Spy on your competitor’s whether they are using social media channels or new letters to connect with their customers?

Figure out their strategies and make it work for you. If you see them stumbling, learn from their mistakes and develop a strong strategy to stand out from the market and invest your money on that.

4. Allocate your budget based on the success

Now when you have an idea of what works best for your business and what not, start allocating your budget based on the success strategies.

Source: Single Grain

Like social media channels won’t cost you anything to post on it. If your previous analysis states that building your brand awareness works well for your business then you must allocate your budget on social media planning of your business.

It would be more effective to hire a social media account manager to perform the social media actions for your business and build your brand awareness. So, analyze the “success factors” of your business and plan your digital marketing budget accordingly.

5. Break down your requirements and plan your content creation

With thorough research on the needs of your business, emphasize how your budget will accommodate the software and manpower resources, which are very important tools for the growth of your business.

For example, if you want benefits of all social media accounts like, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, What would be more beneficial to appoint one staff member for all channels or appoint separate staffs for every channel.

Break down your requirements based on this analysis plan your digital marketing budget.

Also, create content as per your business needs. Whether your business requires in-depth long-form blog posts or short articles, you will need to budget your marketing for writing experts for writing amazing content pieces for your business.

If your business is product based, you will get more benefits from the video content. So your budget will account for recording department, editing equipment, and various other factors.

Analyze your target audience and your business needs and break down your marketing budget as per the needs.

6. Choose the right platforms

Choose the right platform to present your business. Available on all digital platforms whether it is paid advertising, social media advertising or any other, make sure that you reach out to your potential customers through all the platforms.

Spend on the effective marketing strategies for your business; it may be content marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing or any other. Analyze your digital marketing budget and chose the best channels.

7. Analyze your results

Keep a track of whether your money is well spent or wasted by analyzing the results of the digital marketing strategies you have implemented in your business.

With best analytics tools like Google Analytics, you can monitor your results and analyze their effectiveness for your business. You can even make some adjustments and make it more effective for our business growth.

Your marketing strategies represent your brand, your products, and services. So, invest in quality and choose your spending options wisely. Planning your digital marketing budget with the best possible tricks and strategies is the key to success.

About The Author:

George is a corporate relationship manager at INC Academy – provide Digital Marketing Course in Dubai. He likes to share his knowledge on digital marketing topics.