PR News | How to manage a marketing budget

For any business, effectively managing a marketing budget can be a daunting task without prior marketing experience or training. Choosing where and how much of your budget to allocate to various marketing, advertising, and public relations strategies can be stressful, but with a few tips, your business can strategically place its marketing dollars to maximize exposure without spending too much.

Define marketing objectives

Before any expense, it is crucial to set goals for your next campaign based on your business needs. These benchmarks will be essential to measure the viability and success of your campaign through key performance indicators. Without clear goals, a marketing campaign can easily become disorganized, leading to unnecessary expense, mixed messages, and low return on investment (ROI). Think about what you want your business to accomplish and base your marketing goals on those needs. Being able to show a return on investment is essential to ensuring the success of a campaign.

Choose a strategy

The marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade. With the growing popularity of social media, influencer marketing, and search engine optimization, it is necessary to be aware of new marketing tools and how they will factor into your marketing budget. By choosing a strategy and carefully planning the marketing methods you want to incorporate into your campaign, as well as their costs, staying within your budget is simple. Costs and scope differ between each marketing technique, but through research and understanding your business needs, developing and budgeting for a marketing strategy is entirely doable.

Learn from the past

Past campaigns are a great resource to use when planning a new campaign. Measuring a campaign’s KPIs, such as customer engagement, satisfaction, and revenue growth/loss, indicates whether the campaign was successful or whether changes are needed. Comparing the budgets and ROI of past campaigns with those of potential campaigns can help you determine if this is a viable use of marketing dollars.

With the multitude of marketing methods available today, it can be difficult to stick to a set budget. However, with careful planning, strategy, monitoring, and thought, you will be able to easily manage your marketing budget.

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Lindsey Carnett is CEO of Marketing Maven, which specializes in media relations, social media strategy, branding and creative direction