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Building a thriving business goes beyond having the right product or service offering. You need to attract customers to the business, and that pretty much involves setting and measuring the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
Aside from KPIs, you have to direct your energy and resources into developing a viable marketing strategy — and that’s where the marketing plan budget comes in. To get a good grasp of a marketing plan, you’ve got to study some marketing plan budget examples — and enough of such examples are provided in this guide.
A good marketing plan budget is a sure way to secure your business growth, and also make sure that all actions align with your short-term and long-term goals. By studying the marketing plan budget examples in this guide, you’d pretty much come up with ways to increase your gross profit, and generate a better return on investment (ROI) for your business.
But what is a marketing plan and why is it important?
A marketing plan outlines a company’s goals and marketing efforts — it could be a single-page document, or a document with numerous campaign plans from various marketing teams. Regardless of how complex your marketing plans are, the plan should be focused on organizing, executing, and measuring how your marketing strategies are performing. With a robust marketing plan, you’d get a plan that showcases how to acquire new customers and also sell your product or service offering.
Aside from all these, a marketing plan shows you how your marketing efforts have been performing. A good marketing plan helps you to steer your marketing campaign in a way that aligns with your business values and also fine tunes your campaigns in such a way that you generate better results.
Still skeptical of the importance of a marketing plan? Well, everything will be done by guesswork — and you’d end up not having a fireproof strategy that generates results. In a nutshell, you won’t know the part of your campaign that generates the most sales.
Moving on, you’ve got to figure out what is included in a marketing budget.
Regardless of the kind of effort and investment you pour into measuring your advertising campaigns, you need a solid understanding of the black box. For newbies, black box marketing is a model for studying customers’ buying behavior. You can measure what enters and comes out of the black box. However, it’s somewhat impossible to pinpoint what goes inside the customer’s mind — you can only guess, and your guess is largely dependent on the behavioral pattern of your customer.
Interestingly, customers are not always conscious of the reason why they choose a specific product from a wide range of options. To keep up with the behavioral pace of the customer, you’ve got to track your marketing plan performance along with other key performance indicators. Speaking of the performance of your marketing plan, you’ve got to focus on the right things — and that’s why keeping a close eye on metrics like returning customers and conversions are of the essence.
The marketing budget is a vital part of the marketing plan. With a marketing budget, you get to see the money that’s likely to be spent on marketing-related items over a specified time. Next, you’ve got to multiply the estimated daily budget by 30.4 to get your monthly budget estimate. For clarity, 30.4 represents the average number of days per month.
For instance, if the estimated cost of your ad group is $5.00 per day, the monthly budget estimate would be $152. Your estimated marketing budget should pretty much cover the marketing cost of your product or service offering. Items like promotions, exhibitions, print advertising, public relations, demonstrations, giveaway (or free product sampling), and social media should be thoroughly covered.
Here comes the big question — how do you write a budget for a marketing plan? Well, here’s what you need to know.
When it comes to the effectiveness of your marketing budget, your long-term and short-term marketing goals come into play. A thorough understanding of what you’re aiming for both in the long-term and short-term helps you come up with the right marketing strategy.
You’d agree that a marketing strategy is primarily designed to boost your gross revenue — and that can be achieved by either using direct sales or a sales funnel. As a general rule of thumb, you’ve got to keep in mind that there’s no shortcut to marketing — and most times, you don’t generate your desired result overnight. You’ve got to keep tweaking until you achieve your desired result.
Here are some examples of short-term goals.
Short-term goal examples:
Long-term goal examples:
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of who your ideal customer is. It’s okay to have multiple buyer personas, but you’ve got to limit it to five maximum buyer personas. After all, your product or service offering is not for everyone — and creating a product for everyone is a recipe for disaster.
When it comes to creating a buyer persona, you’ve got to be specific and draw insight from the right data sources. Here are reliable ways of gathering data that would be used for the creation of your buyer persona.
For each customer persona, you’ve got to include information like;
To get a robust understanding of your target market, you’ve got to perform thorough research — and that includes conducting the primary and secondary research. After the research process, you’ve got to take a close look at the data and answer questions that are relevant to your target audience.
Good data analysis will help you discover where your customers live, their income and education level, and other factors that could limit them from buying from you. As a side note, you should know that the economic situation can affect your product sales.
Yes, the current economic condition pretty much affects your customer’s budget. This will, in turn, affect your sales in the long run. Aside from the economic conditions, other factors like technology could affect your sales.
Let’s say there has been some technological improvement in the marketplace, such changes in technology could affect the way customers make payments or shop. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of your customer’s wants and needs could pretty much help you understand the current market conditions.
Moving on, you’ve got to pinpoint the needs or challenges that your product or service offering could solve. A good study of your competition should be a vital piece of your marketing plan.
How are your competitors performing, and what ad type and marketing strategy are they using? If you can know their marketing budget, that would be fine. As a side note, you’ve got to understand that industry type has a direct impact on the amount spent during marketing.
As a business owner, you’ve got to choose the right marketing channel from any of these categories.
A good understanding of the various marketing channels could help you come up with the best budget for your marketing plan. Each of the marketing channels attracts some cost, but if you’re on a tight budget, you should opt for social media advertising. Why? Because it’s the most cost-effective channel. A thorough understanding of your target audience, a reliable marketing channel, and your goals are pretty much what you need to build a good marketing plan.
Having a good marketing plan is good, but you’ve got to figure out which graph is best for budgeting.
Graphs and charts are arguably the most reliable ways to keep track of the marketing channels — it’s also a good way to help you draw insights by identifying trends and patterns. Knowledge gotten from these graphs and charts can help you make better decisions in the long run.
If you’re looking for a good way to represent your data for proper data visualization, then graphs and charts are your best bet. There are various types of graphs and tables that can be used to effectively represent data — but that’s largely dependent on the data type you want to represent.
To get started with data visualization, you’ve got to opt for tools like ChartExpo. The ChartExpo tool helps in the creation of various complex charts and graphs. This way, you’d easily represent your data in an easy-to-digest format.
Let’s say you manage an online store where you’re doing lots of sales using various marketing strategies, and you want to visually showcase your budget spending, all you’ve got to do is tabulate your data as shown below.
Using ChartExpo, you can quickly get a column chart similar to the one below.
If you want to generate maximum ROI, then you’ve got to effectively optimize your marketing budget — and that includes identifying what’s working and what’s not. This way, you’d know what to focus on and what to leave behind.
When it comes to optimizing your campaign, you’ve got to be swift in action. Whether the needed change is small or big, simple or complex, negative or positive — swift action counts — and that would help you generate the most results in no time. Speaking of changes, you need a reliable tool to help you identify such changes — and that’s where the PPC Signal tool comes in.
For instance, if you’re running a campaign and you want to identify if you’re spending within your proposed budget, then you’ve got to navigate to the PPC Signal dashboard and choose the cost icon from the metrics options. After that, you’d see an automated real-time signal displayed on your screen.
From the signal, you get to draw insights from your campaign — and such insights will probably revolve around your campaign cost and other things like outliers, trends, shifts, and data anomalies. To explore your signal, you’ve got to click on the Explore button.
After clicking on the Explore button, you’d get a graphical representation of your campaign — and you get to see the changes in your campaign cost.
There is also an option of checking the tabular representation of your data and comparing them with other metrics that possibly affect the cost per conversion of your campaign.
The automated generated signal report shows it all, and you get quick decisions to help you generate higher ROI. Here are adjustments you should consider making:
Ideally, your marketing budget should be a portion of your revenue. Typically, the marketing budget of B2B companies is 2 to 5% of their revenue. That of B2C companies is somewhat higher — around 5 to 10% of the revenue.
The average marketing budget for most startups is 11.2% of their revenue — that’s what you’d have to spend if you want to attract leads and build more brand awareness.
No, salaries are not part of your marketing budget. Sales commissions and salaries are not part of your marketing budget.
A budget could be of any of these types — surplus, balanced, or deficient budget.
A good marketing plan is an effective way of generating more leads and growing your brand awareness. However, it’s not set in stone. When designing a marketing plan, you’ve got to give room for improvement and some tweaking.
Having a good marketing plan budget is of the essence, but it has to be solid — and minimize the possibility of bouncing between ideas. If your marketing plan is not designed to achieve a single objective, then you’re in for some tough time.
What’s more, you’ve got to fully represent your marketing plan using some effective data visualization tools. Speaking of data visualization, that’s where the tool comes in.
Now you know how to plan your marketing budget, what product will you be promoting in your next launch?
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