3 Steps to Building Marketing Budget for 2023

Owning a small or medium-sized business (SMB) comes with plenty of responsibility. Not only are you the owner, but you are also in charge of hiring people, accounts payable, and even acquiring new customers. Of course, one of the best ways to help increase the number of customers for your business is by investing in a marketing budget.

A marketing budget empowers organizations to push through the noise and have their materials be seen. A budget can also help find prospective customers and increase your services’ awareness. A budget might not seem worth it if you already utilize free marketing, such as social media, but it can make a stark difference.

Things to consider

When deciding to build a marketing budget, there are a few components to consider. A budget will set the foundation to learn your return on investment (ROI) and optimize targeting for prospective customers. If you plan on supporting any marketing initiative with funds, you want to know precisely how the funds were spent and what your organization got in return. A significant positive to activating a budget is that ROI is easier to find. You will learn the price per click, conversion, or how many people saw your ad because of the money you spent.

Additionally, finding qualified leads and prospective customers becomes easier when you have a budget. Suppose you decide to spend marketing dollars on social media. In that case, you can target users based on what they like or what their friends like finding customers who may not have known your organization existed.

Step to building a budget

Now that you know why a marketing budget will help your SMB, understanding how to build a budget is the next step. According to the U.S Small Business Administration, businesses with less than five million dollars in sales spend about 8 percent of revenue on marketing. An SMB marketing budget depends on many factors, including industry, company age, and available cash. Therefore, it is not as simple as delegating 8 percent of revenue each quarter to marketing. Deciding on a few more components will help narrow down the budget.

Setting clear marketing goals helps decide how much money to put towards the budget. You need to prove why utilizing the funds was necessary and that they were used effectively. Next, decide how to use the budget. There are many channels, including asset creation, social media, print materials, a website, email marketing, and SEO, where you can assign a portion of the budget. Finally, consider using part of the marketing budget to hire a professional. The professional can be the person who strategizes, creates, runs, and analyzes the campaigns.

Goals for your new budget

Developing your new marketing budget goals can be intimidating, but it should also be exciting. Make sure you set long-term and short-term goals. Short-term goals should be attainable and able to be measured. For example, a short-term goal could be to increase the number of followers on your social media channel by twenty. Meanwhile, a long-term goal would be to increase website traffic from social media by 50 percent.

Building a marketing budget is an essential component of any business, and the budget helps to increase revenue and the number of customers who utilize your business. The steps we reviewed today will help expedite the process and have your SMB on the way to success in no time.