(You can download our marketing budget template here — just click the button to get started)
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Everyone knows the importance of a budget, and as one of the key members of your business, you know it better than most.
Budgets help keep you from spending off your profits, buying unnecessary items instead of required ones, and generally are crucial to keeping your business afloat.
But while you may have a budget for your business, do you have a dedicated budget specifically for marketing?
Most people don’t, which is crazy given how vital marketing is for any business.
This is understandable though, especially for the time-pressed CEO or marketing director — Sometimes it’s just easier to lump all your marketing expenses into one line item on your budget and call it a day.
I urge you to think differently about your marketing budget, mostly because it’s so crucial to your business.
Using a Marketing Budget Template Can Help You Stay Disciplined
Marketing is not something that you can just leave out of your budget when it’s time to tighten things up—it’s an essential part of any business.
Businesses that don’t market themselves fail, and we want to make sure your business grows, so we made a marketing budget template — just the button below to download it now.
The goal of the template is to remove barriers to creating a budget — namely, the need to design it in the first place. With this template, you can just drop in your numbers and tweak it to suit your needs.
And when you know exactly what you’re spending and what you’re spending it on, keeping that necessary marketing machine moving forward becomes a whole lot easier.
Learn More About the Template Now
When Filling Out Your Marketing Budget Template, Include Every Digital Marketing Component
You need to think about your plan holistically—have you accounted for every single type of marketing you want to be doing? Ask yourself if you have a budget for these baseline avenues of marketing:
- Website and Landing Pages
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Promotional Items
- Outdoor Advertising
- Radio and TV Advertising
- Consulting and Coaching
This is a baseline to get you started, and it certainly doesn’t include everything—when you download the marketing budget template, you’ll find line items for a variety of marketing strategies.
If you’re doing a lot of these things yourself (and many manufacturers, distributors, importer/exporters, and other industrial B2B businesses do), make sure you’re accounting for your time appropriately.
Calculating your hourly rate is a good place to start, but you also need to take into account how many hours a week you spend managing something like email marketing.
You also need to consider this—that time is not being spent bringing in leads working, so factor that into your rate.
You may find that it’s quite a bit cheaper to pay someone else to do your marketing for you so you can focus on the things you do best.
You have to think about just how much of a hit your business will take if you’re spending your valuable time doing your own marketing (or doing some of the marketing that you could easily have some else do so you can focus on the pieces you know best).
What You Need to Consider When Filling Out Your Marketing Budget Template
As you’re filling out your marketing budget template, keep some of these ideas in mind:
Website
Your website is going to have a large, one-time fee, but you also need to consider how much regular hosting and maintenance is going to cost.
If you’re going to do your own maintenance, factor in your hourly rate plus the time you could have spent on other, more valuable activities to see what that will actually cost you compared to having someone else do it.
Some things, like domain purchase, might not repeat each month, so keep in mind that not everything on your marketing budget template is going to have a repeating fee.
SEO and PPC
If you’re doing SEO and PPC, you may need to create a good deal of content yourself (or hire a third party to create it).
Make sure you factor this into your costs, especially if you’re going to do it in-house.
Social Media
Are you going to use 3rd party software to manage your social media? Are you going to have someone in-house take care of it?
Will you be creating images for each of your posts? Will you need to buy software to do so? How much will all of this cost you?
Email Marketing
Just like with social media, if you’re using 3rd party software to send out your emails, it may or may not have a cost associated with it. If you’re buying lists, that’s another cost you need to factor in.
You also need to really think about how these will be written.
Is it worth your time to spend 1 or 2 hours struggling to put out an email that might not be perfect when you could pay a professional writer to do the same thing in 30 minutes, possibly at a higher quality?
Download the Marketing Budget Template Now
If you’re ready to get on track with your marketing budget, a template is just what you need — click the button to download it today.
