How To Plan Your Digital Marketing Budget For 2020
It’s a new decade, and it’s the perfect time to start thinking about your digital marketing budget for the year ahead. When it comes to your budgeting process, you need to view digital marketing as an investment that will be rewarded. Companies are now spending much of their overall marketing budget on digital marketing. They are also investing in multiple marketing tools and customer service applications which can help set their business apart from competitors. You should do the same, but first you have to examine what works for your business, and what can be left in the last decade.
Below are four important considerations for your 2020 digital marketing budget.
1. Examine Your Past Efforts
Marketing is never based on guesses. Before you begin defining your goals and how you can achieve them, you must first look back over your past successes. Pull the data from your email marketing service, Google analytics, marketing automation system, and thoroughly analyse it. What worked and what let your business down?
Prioritise your marketing tactics according to what worked in prior years. Also, ensure you include all the external factors that influenced business growth besides digital marketing. Perhaps you lost some good employees or a new competitor emerged?
2. Define Your Marketing Goals for 2020
You’ve examined the successes and failures of your past marketing tactics. Now, it’s time to define your goals for the year ahead. Before you get moving, you have to know where you’re heading. Otherwise, you’ll veer off the path to marketing success. Ensure that your marketing goals are quantifiable, specific and strategic.
Begin by defining your long-term goals, and then break those down into achievable short-term objectives. That will help you gain insight into how much revenue you’ll require and how many leads you need to generate.
3. Get On-Trend
What are your competitors up to in the year ahead? Are there any current or new emerging trends in your industry? You have to be ahead of the curb if you want to stay competitive. Depending on your position, you either need to stand out or catch up in terms of ideas. Find out what’s working for your competitors, and add those methods to your digital marketing plan.
4. Decide On The Best Marketing Channels For Your Business
Digital marketing has a wealth of channel options to choose from. It is recommended you utilise an integrated approach of two or more of these channels.
These include:
- Social Media Marketing: Social media is an outstanding tool for brands who have a pre-existing online presence. The best platforms to utilise are Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn (depending on your type of business).
- Email Marketing: Utilise email marketing to generate new leads and add responsive elements to enhance engagement. Email marketing is now a standard for most companies in the year ahead.
- PPC (Pay-Per-Click): PPC is a paid advertisement where your business pays when someone clicks on your created ad. It’s highly customisable and you can specify bids, ad copy, times of day, targeting etc.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Does your website rank highly on search engine result pages? Through optimising your website for search engines, you will generate more attention and grow your business.
- Web Development: Customers desire fast-loading, well-designed and highly responsive websites. Your website is often the first impression a prospect will have of your brand, so it is important that it is representing your company in an awesome way.
- Content Marketing: Creating educational, informative, valuable and entertaining content for your audience can take you a long way. It can be utilised for building authority and nurturing leads. Once your audience perceives you as an expert, they will consider your business for purchases.
There is no overriding formula to digital marketing success, but by analysing your past efforts, defining your future objectives and keeping updated with the latest industry trends, you should be able to develop a solid investment strategy for 2020.
