Where To Spend Your Marketing Dollars

In a world of numerous options where small businesses have to choose suitable marketing strategies for their brands, it is important for them to make the right decisions so as to achieve desired results. Which is why they’re often saddled with the question of what marketing strategy to spend on. Especially for new business owners who haven’t gained enough marketing experience. Yet, some new business owners make the mistake of putting their money on as many marketing strategies as possible. Also, some are nonchalant with marketing by avoiding it, based on the opinion that they will do it when they become a more established business.
We want you to know that these two kinds of business owners did not make the right decision. Since you are here, we can conclude that you have made a good decision by researching this issue. And if you have already started off on the wrong foot, that’s not a problem, you can review your decisions and start afresh.

First, Know Your Gross Revenue

Your gross revenue is your earnings before taking out any expenses, deductions and whatnot. As a new business owner, you may not be able to know this because you haven’t earned anything yet. What you do in this case is use an estimate, that is how much you intend to make in the next one year.

Decide Your Proposed Marketing Budget

On average, businesses allocate around 6% – 10% of their revenue for marketing. According to the recent CMO survey, B2B product companies use 8.6% of their revenue for marketing, while B2C service companies use 15.6% of their revenue for marketing. The Small Business Administration recommends that marketing budget should be around 7% – 8% of revenue.
For small businesses that are older than five years, a marketing budget between 6% -12% of revenue is enough. Except when you are creating a new brand. For new businesses to achieve the best results that will create awareness and establish the brand, they can increase their marketing budget to anything from 12% – 20% of their revenue.

How To Determine Where to Spend Your Marketing Budget

Now that you know how much you want to spend on marketing, it is important for you to spend it wisely so that you can achieve your goals of growing your brand. There are two ways to determine where to spend your marketing budget this year, which are by looking inward and looking outward. You have to do both as they both offer the marketing boost your business needs.

Looking Inward: Review Your Previous Marketing Strategies

Analyze your previous marketing strategies against budget, eventual marketing expenses and results of the strategies within a period. The period can be your marketing history for the last quarter, six months or a year. Your marketing strategies are whatever you spent money on to create awareness for your business or product. To do this, you have to analyze each of your previous or/and existing marketing strategies using this standard;
your budget for each strategy in view
the eventual amount of money spent on each strategy in view including miscellaneous expenses
and the performance of each strategy to check for results (ROI).
At the end of your analysis, you will be able to separate the marketing strategies that achieved an impressive return on investments from those that performed poorly. The plan is to spend more on marketing strategies with the highest return on investment. If they achieved great results before, chances are that they will continue to do so.

Looking Outward: Adopt New Strategies That Are Yielding Results

While your old marketing strategies might have given you the results you wanted, you still need to expand and adopt new strategies that are yielding results. Doing this will let you tap into new opportunities while remaining relevant across different times. For example, imagine running a website that doesn’t give mobile users a good experience in 2020. That will have a negative effect on business in the long run because most internet users prefer to use their mobile devices for their internet activities. Therefore, websites that don’t give full experience will always lose potential customers. What you need to do is research trendy marketing strategies businesses in your niche market are using. Don’t pick just any trendy strategy, no. Instead, select those that are yielding successful results and that is suitable for your market.

Marketing Strategies You Should Consider Spending On This Year

Digital marketing is more prominent now because of the amazing results it generates for businesses. As a result, most businesses spend 45% out of their total marketing budget on digital marketing. Here are some trusted marketing strategies you should invest in this year.

Content: ”content is king” is a cliche and at the same an e-commerce truth that continues to yield great results when done well. Thankfully, you don’t have to know how to create quality content, you can outsource by hiring a copywriter to write your blog posts or web articles.

SEO: if you haven’t been investing time and resources in SEO right from when you started your business, you should know that you are late. Start right away; this applies to new businesses as well. Don’t postpone SEO till when you are established, do it now.

Paid Ads: paid ads, if done well, will not only create awareness for your brand but will also generate leads, boost conversion and sales. Evaluate numerous paid ads to decide which one is good for business and budget.

Landing Page: this doesn’t require a lot of effort. All you need to know is how to create an effective landing page that leads to conversion. Use a welcoming design with warm or cool colors depending on the content of the page, with bold fonts, valuable content and an effective CTA.

Social Media Marketing: Facebook remains the superior social media for marketing. Instagram is also good for getting the desired results. So, as a small business owner, make sure Facebook and Instagram are part of your marketing.

Tracking: in all you do, keep in mind that you need to keep track of it, assess it and restrategize. Hence, you need to invest in marketing tools to get accurate data from your marketing strategies. You can use free or premium tools, as long as it offers you functional features that will help monitor your data and give you meaningful analysis.