Chances are you’re making one or more of these mistakes
Creating a precise marketing budget is challenging, and any mistake could be costly. Just one blunder can throw off the company’s entire marketing strategy. Also, you will most likely have fewer financial resources available for the budget than you wish. So it pays to understand the common errors businesses make when planning budgets.
Before you venture to create your digital marketing budget, you should come to terms with a very important fact: you will most likely, almost always, have less financial resources than you need or wish you had to run your digital marketing efforts.
Let us explore the most common mistakes, and how to avoid them to come up with a precise B2B marketing budget.
1. NOT HAVING CLEAR SET GOALS
The biggest mistake businesses make when creating a digital marketing budget is trying to build it without goals. You can’t plan a budget for something you have not defined. Work on your digital marketing goals and make sure they’re aligned with your company’s vision. Prioritize expenses according to these target goals.
2. BEGINNING WITH BAD DATA
To create a digital marketing budget, you need data. Relying on bad data or human error when interpreting the data is one of the most common mistakes companies make when planning a budget.
To avoid this mistake, boost your data gathering and analytics capabilities. You should also benchmark performance of every process before and after launching a digital marketing campaign to evaluate platforms and their overall effectiveness. Diversity guarantees ROI
If you are not doing multicultural marketing, particularly in a place like America, you’re not doing marketing.
Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, P&G
Marketing spend statistics you should know:
- 58.9 Million Hispanic in the US with $1.7 Trillion Spending Power
- 42.6 Million African American in the US with $1.2 Trillion Spending Power
- 18.6 Million Asian in the US with $1.7 Trillion Spending Power
3. FOCUSING ONLY ON NEW CUSTOMER
Marketers are under tremendous pressure to generate new leads and add new prospects into the sales funnel that will result in new customers and increased sales revenue. Yet, it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer, so it makes good business sense to focus on repeat customers. Your budget and ROI will thank you.
4. FAILING TO EVALUATE YOUR STRATEGY
To know if your budget is delivering results, you must evaluate its effectiveness. Amazingly, most companies admit not testing their digital marketing efforts, while some don’t do it often enough. This is a huge mistake. To avoid this pitfall, monitor and test your digital marketing campaigns’ strategy and execution on a regular basis
5. INVESTING LESS IN PROVEN WORKHORSES
Let us use a common example. Email marketing may be hailed as one of the top channels that entities use to reach and engage prospects effectively. Come budget time, however, it is among the marketing tools that are most overlooked. After all, if it is not broken, it should not be fixed, right? Wrong.
Efficient, well-performing channels are likely to go stale with time if they are not given consistent attention. Why? Because you will always find room for improvement – like better personalization, testing, or automation. Therefore, you should pay attention and keep investing in tried-and-true marketing strategies.
