Ever wonder how much money you should be spending on marketing? You’re not alone! To create an effective and reasonable marketing budget first you need to think about what marketing tactics you would like to use. Decide what platforms would best reach your target customers.
1. Choosing social media platforms
When deciding which platforms to use, think about your target audience. Who are you trying to reach in your posts and what sites do these people use most often?
2. Deciding how much money to spend
Small businesses and start-up should stay in a low percentage range of their total revenues. So if you just opened your company and have no revenue yet, you should probably keep your budget at $0. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and google+ are all great FREE places to start!
Once you begin to make revenue you can consider spending 2-3% or whatever you feel comfortable towards marketing. I would highly suggest staying under 10% of your total revenue.
3. Track, Track, Track
Possibly most important step is to track your progress. Did you spend all of the money you allocated for marketing? If not then you can think about increasing your subscriptions. That can be as simple as paying a low monthly fee to those free websites listed above to increase the chance of it being seen.
OR did you go over your budget? If so, was it worth is? Did you reach more people than you intended to? Did you see an increase in sales? If so then that is okay! Of course it is important to follow a budget but as long as you did not go over your budget too much and did not cause your business to go into debt, that is okay. This just means your marketing was effective and you should think about increasing your budget.
4. Continue to look for trends
Continue to compare each week, month or year to each other. You hopefully will begin to see trend. Maybe there are a few months in the year that you are not reaching your target audience . Think about why this is. For example, people are not searching for bathing suits in the winter so you have less success. If you notice something similar to this, think about increasing your budget over the winter months to continue to reach your customers.
5- Common Sense
Lastly, continue to use common sense. Don;t get too caught up in trying to be the best social media marketer out there.
Written by Emily Wilson on behalf of Roberta Pellant Consulting