Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that take place on the Internet. Businesses use digital channels that can include social media, search engines, email, and other websites to reach current and potential customers.

Digital marketing is the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy that allows you to achieve your goals. For example, if the main goal of your digital marketing strategy is to develop more leads through social media, you can start a digital marketing campaign on Twitter. You can share some of your company’s well-protected content on Twitter to generate more traffic through the channel you are using.

Digital Marketing Spend in 2022

The United States digital advertising system has continued to grow in 2022. Pathmatics’ latest Q2 2022 data collection, now available, reveals that digital advertising spending in the United States reached $23.5 billion, an increase of 11.7% from the first quarter of 2022.

In the second quarter of 2022, social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Snapchat accounted for 61% of the total US social media. Show and video streaming followed with 24% and OTT with 15%. While Facebook still reigns as the #1 platform in terms of media spend in Q2 2022, TikTok is the fastest growing platform, posting a significant increase in growth by 33% to $ 1.2 billion.

Digital Marketing Spend in 2022
Image Source: Pathmatics.com

The Importance of Digital Marketing Budget Planning

It’s important to do your best to get as close to your desired income as possible when planning your budget.

If you make a calculation error, you may get different results. The first risk involves your reputation as a leader. Your team and your leaders will not have low confidence in you if you are not allocating the right resources to the various campaigns and initiatives you want to have. You will also be able to put your department on the line when it comes to budget cuts if senior management thinks you don’t know your numbers.

Another possibility is that you don’t have the budget you need to achieve important digital marketing goals. For example, if you want to get a new number of new leads through advertising, but you don’t have the budget to run long-term advertising to get leads, you will spend a lot of money or lose digital marketing opportunities.

Marketing Budget Breakdown

Check out these very important points you’ll want to establish when setting up your budget.

Create your sales cycle

After you create a marketing budget breakdown, you want to create your sales cycle and funnel. Your marketing budget is an important part of your marketing budget because it determines where you spend your money. Your marketing strategy is the process your audience takes to become paying customers.

Know your external value

If you want to know how to prepare a marketing budget, start by preparing your external costs. You need to know how much everything costs your business, so you know how much you can spend on marketing. So, what external costs do you need to consider?

  • Cost of labor (producing products, shipping them)
  • Employee benefits
  • Your business’s operating costs (electricity, water)
  • And others

You should consider these costs when creating your marketing budget.

Not only does this determine the amount of work you can put into it, but it helps you set the stage for return on investment (ROI).

Determine your business goals

Any guide on how to create a marketing budget will say that you need to set your business goals – and it’s true! You need to know what you want to achieve so that you can plan a budget that allows you to achieve those goals. You can set goals that include:

  • Get more sales
  • Increase engagement
  • Get subscribers
  • Create brand awareness

Understand your market

You need to know where you stand in your market to create an effective marketing budget. When you understand how you stack up against your competition, you can develop strategies to compete with them.

You will want to do competitor research to see how your competition is doing online. You can use competitive analysis tools to help you see where your competitors are currently doing online. This can help you decide which projects you need to spend money on to be successful.

How to Create a Marketing Budget

Companies usually create a quarterly or annual marketing budget. They will be comprehensive and include all the activities that your group plans to implement in the short and long term. These four steps will assist you in creating and setting up your marketing budget.

Identify your marketing goals

Marketing aims to create sales opportunities or create direct sales to maximize revenue. To create an effective marketing budget, you need to determine short- and long-term marketing goals and set key performance indicators (KPIs) as part of your marketing strategy analysis.

Understand your target audience

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customers. You can have more than one buyer, and try more than five; After all, not everyone can be your audience.

Understand your market and your competition

Market research, especially consumer demographics, can help you better understand your target market.

To understand your market, review the following information:

  • General demographic information.
  • Where do your customers live?
  • What are their education level and average income?

Customer wants and needs

Another way to understand your market is to find out what they want and need. What are the main needs that your company can fill in the market? Consider broader customer needs. For example, your target market’s needs may include feeling safe in their area or saving money.

Choose your marketing channel

To get the best return on your spend, market where your buyers go. The media channels you should consider are divided into four main categories:

  • Digital marketing:Digital advertising channels include social media advertising (costing between $4000 and $7000 per month), online content marketing, automated or manual email marketing (costing $300 – $1500 per month), online advertising with pay-per-click advertising (costing $9000-$10,000 per month) or classifieds advertising (advertising) payment) and search engine optimization.
  • Inbound marketing:Some inbound marketing channels are linked to digital marketing, including SEO (costing between $1500 and $5000 per month), business blogging, YouTube and Vimeo videos, eBooks, and other parts of your content strategy.
  • Outbound marketing can be difficult to find, so it helps to combine it with inbound marketing. The most common form of outbound marketing is email marketing. Other types of outbound marketing include television and radio advertising, direct mail, newspaper publications, trade shows, and promotional products.
  • Brand advertising campaigns: These channels can also be integrated with other channels and can include social media and advertising, content marketing (costing $2000 – $10,000 per month), social media, and video marketing and advertising.

Marketing Budget Planning

Once you have your plan, goals, and numbers, you can start building your budget around that. A marketing budget is next on your list. You need to know what to do with the money you have been given.

If you have a small marketing budget, you should consider print advertising and get involved locally. With a medium budget, you can add online advertising and with a large budget, you can add radio and/or TV advertising.

One thing that should be in all budget sizes is social media presence. With social media, you can attract a lot of potential customers. Usually, people ask – how much? How much do they need to spend on something? The answer is, as always – it depends.

It depends on the strategy you described earlier. Do you want to build customer loyalty and slowly create profitable leads that pay off big or do you want to speed up and put more resources into a complex marketing process? You should be looking for something else, more leads, more customers, and more growth.

If you’re looking to create a marketing plan that stays within your company’s budget, or if you’re looking to better understand marketing costs, you’ve come to the right place!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Cost: $1,500 – $5,000 per month

SEO is anything your business does to improve its ranking on search engines like Google. At a time when most consumers are researching their options online before making a purchase – and many are even buying those items online – this is important.

When your site ranks well for searches related to your industry, you can reach potential customers who may not have heard of your business otherwise. But unlike traditional advertising methods, such as radio and TV advertising, you reach them when they are looking to buy something.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Cost: $9,000 to $10,000 per month

PPC is a great way to get traffic to your site fast, and it’s a great friend to SEO. While SEO can take some time to produce results, PPC is essentially immediate.

As soon as you place PPC ads in search engines, you start driving traffic to your website. PPC campaigns use an auction system, so you control how much you’re paying for an ad because you decide. You bid on the keywords you want your ad to rank for, and if you outbid your competitors, you’ll get ad space that targets your specific keyword.

Website

Cost: $1,000 to $100,000

If your company site doesn’t live up to two or if you don’t have a website at all, it’s time to start looking for one.

Today, there are thousands of design and development companies that can help your business create a website, which means it will be perfect for your work and your budget.

Content Marketing

Cost: $2,000 – $10,000 per month

Content marketing refers to the process of writing and publishing text, graphics, videos, uploads and more on your business website. This goes hand in hand with SEO and is one of the most effective ways to drive visitors and links to your site.

However, there is more to it than meets the eye when it comes to writing and creating successful content. To attract people to your site, you need to find out the topics that interest your audience. Second, your content should be researched, written, and promoted better than any other content on the same topic.

Social Media

Cost: $4,000 – $7,000 per month

When it comes to social media marketing, most companies take a do-it-yourself approach. And when businesses are just starting to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to reach new customers, DIY is often all they need. Now that almost every business has an account on multiple platforms, it is becoming more and more difficult to stand out and reach customers.

Combine that with Facebook’s poor organic reach, and it might not be worth your time. Fortunately, this is not the case. Social media can still be a great way to raise awareness and attract new customers – it takes less time and effort than posting an update once or twice a month. This is where hiring a social media management team can be very helpful.

Email Marketing

Cost: $300 to $1,500 per month

Despite the hundreds of marketing methods and methods that have evolved since email, it remains one of the most effective ways to market.

This is partly because of the low cost and high return on investment, and also because it gives your business access to subscribers’ inboxes. And thanks to the advanced email marketing platforms available today, we’ve come a long way from the days of the perfect email newsletter.

Projected Digital Marketing Spend 2023

Digital marketing spending will reach $146 billion by 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9%, according to a Forrester report shared with Marketing Dive. According to the “US Digital Marketing Forecast, 2018 to 2023,” about half of the marketers expect their search budgets to remain the same in 2019. This volume will grow at a CAGR of 7%, the slowest to date, to reach $60 billion by 2023.

However, search advertising budgets are expected to shift to voice, and voice queries from voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant will be common within five years. Marketers must switch from pay-per-click to voice skills, SEO, content on sites like Pinterest, and branding to get the most out of voice.

Meanwhile, Amazon has removed some of the searches from Google. Google’s cost per click (CPC) fell 28% in Q3 2018, the 14th quarter in a row of poor performance, but it can still add value to the network and small business advertisers.

The Bottom Line

Your digital presence is similar to your physical store. It’s where customers will “go in”, get to know you and see what you have to offer. This is the first place most of your customers will see you. And if you don’t have a physical store, this is the only place where people will find you! That is why it is important to invest in a digital presence that is easy to find, informative, useful, and easy to use.

That said, knowing how to invest in your digital marketing can be tricky. There are many things you can do; it can be very heavy. To create a digital marketing plan on a budget, take a step back to look at what you’ve done in the past, what worked and what didn’t, and look for growth opportunities. Good data and analysis will help ensure that you spend money in areas that get the best ROI for your organization.