There is a good chance that a greater portion of your marketing budget will be allocated to digital marketing with each passing year, regardless of the method by which your company determines its marketing budget—whether it uses traditional methods, follows current trends, or has a custom formula based on specific needs.
During the course of our investigation into the development of marketing, we questioned over five hundred chief marketing officers and discovered that 58 percent of them are moving a portion of their budgets from conventional to digital marketing.
The exact monetary amount of your digital marketing budget will vary depending on aspects such as the sort of company you run, its size, and the sector you operate in; nonetheless, you may benefit from suggestions and tactics to maximise your spending.
In this article, we present eight helpful recommendations on how to optimise the money your company allocates to digital marketing in order to achieve the most value and accomplish the goals set for the business.
- Determine Which Activities Are Included in the Scope of Digital Marketing
If you want to get the most out of your financial resources, you need to have a solid understanding of the components that fall under the category of “digital marketing” and those that do not. Many businesses consider everything that takes place online to be part of their digital marketing efforts; however, not all activities or services are necessarily included in the marketing category.
You will be able to concentrate on the appropriate platforms after you have determined what will and will not be featured. Consider participating in some of the following activities:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — Some senior marketers may not consider SEO or organic traffic to be a marketing activity; yet, it is a crucial tool when it comes to generating quality leads and driving traffic. SEO is also known as “organic traffic.” Have a look at some helpful reporting tools for SEO as well as a free checklist.
The individuals who fall into your target market are likely to utilise social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media is quickly becoming a significant source of qualified prospects for many businesses.
When it comes to internet marketing, pay-per-click (also known as PPC) advertising is often considered to be the gold standard. With this kind of advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and you may target customers based on very specific demographics. (If you need assistance with your marketing efforts, check out our PPC tracker for eCommerce.)
Email Marketing (also known as inbound marketing) –
Email marketing, which is more of a ‘pull’ kind of approach as opposed to a ‘push’ type of strategy, is still a viable technique to promote to individuals online.
Digital Display includes things like banner advertisements and online video, among other things. Current banner ads are designed to be non-intrusive and targeted, while online video is quickly becoming the marketing medium of the future.
The production of content, including website pages and blogs —
When considering your marketing budget, it is easy to overlook the importance of content development; nonetheless, the production of high-quality content is an essential component of the bigger picture.
- Determine the Online Locations Where Your Audience Spends the Most Time
Getting to know your consumers better and gaining an insight of where they spend their time online is the first step in the process of optimising your budget. In this manner, you will be able to optimise the return on your investment as well as allocate your resources to the suitable locations. The findings of a research of this sort sometimes take marketers by surprise since they may have preconceived notions about the environments in which their ideal customers are most likely to be found.
For instance, if your company spends a significant portion of its digital marketing budget to capitalise on the power of LinkedIn but later discovers that the majority of its clients spend the majority of their time on Facebook, the marketing dollars that were spent were not used in an effective manner.
Your marketing team will be able to watch where your target audience spends their time, how long they remain, and what leads them to leave if they employ analytics (like GA4) and advanced metrics. In order to successfully collect this information, it is crucial to first develop a “persona” of your ideal consumer. This will allow you to better understand the kind of information you need to find.
If you have a budget, you want to also have personalities that you can base your decisions on. However, if for some reason that hasn’t occurred, you should build extensive personas of your ideal customer or client. These personas should contain the customer or client’s age, gender, work title, income, family life, hobbies, interests, and anything else that is pertinent to the situation.
- Test Multiple Channels
The practise of digital marketing can be somewhat unpredictable, and what is successful for one marketer may not necessarily be successful for another.
Your organisation should have defined key performance indicators (KPIs) early on in the process of budgeting, and by testing across different channels and evaluating results against your KPIs, you will have a clearer understanding of what is working and what isn’t working. You could discover that one of your channels has a conversion rate that is notably greater than the others, or that your cost per conversion (CPC) is either much lower or significantly higher on one of your channels.
Testing across a variety of channels enables you to take advantage of chances and steer clear of regions that aren’t producing outcomes that are worth keeping an eye on. At this stage, you are in a position to maximise the effectiveness of your digital marketing budget by concentrating your efforts on the channels that provide the most return on investment (ROI). It is quite likely that the 80/20 rule can be utilised, and depending on your sector, it may even be possible to use the 90/10 rule.
4. Remarketing Across Multiple Channels
Remarketing is an activity that is simple to overlook, but it is also one that has the potential to provide a significant return on a little investment.
For the benefit of those who are unaware, remarketing and retargeting are two terms that refer to the same practise, which enables you to display advertisements to people who have visited your website or clicked on one of your ads but have not yet converted. They have already shown an interest, and as a result, when they visit other websites and platforms, they will see your advertisements.
In the past, retargeting did not follow website visitors to other channels like social media or mobile apps. But now, thanks to cross-channel remarketing, if someone clicks on an ad on Google (here’s a tutorial for beginners), they may afterwards see follow-up advertisements on Facebook or Twitter.
After making first contact with your company, your company should provide potential customers further opportunities to engage with your brand, such as a second or third opportunity to do so. You will only be charged for the ad’s placement if it receives a click, as is the case with all PPC advertisements.
5. Recognize Emerging Trends to Maintain Your Competitive Edge
Conducting research on what other senior-level marketers in your business are doing will help you gain a better sense of how to maximise the effectiveness of your digital marketing budget.
A study of senior marketing executives and chief marketing officers found that twenty percent of respondents rated increasing their return on investment (ROI) on their marketing spend as the most important challenge they face in 2023.
That is not to mean that you should imitate the competition exactly, but being abreast of what your rivals are up to online can provide you with a clearer picture of the areas in which you need improvement in order to maintain your position as a formidable opponent.
For instance, if a competitor has captured a significant market share and you want to take it from them, learning where they allocate dollars and how they optimise their budgets will help you determine your own budget. This is also helpful if you want to take that market share from the competitor in the first place.
