Where should you spend your marketing budget?
Over the past decade, where businesses spend their marketing dollars has changed dramatically, but everyone knows that having a marketing plan is crucial for building a companies brand, especially their online presence.
The Gartner 2019-20 CMO Spend Survey found that 61% of CMOs expect their marketing budgets to increase in 2020, demonstrating the importance of a smartly executed plan. However, it is not always as easy as it seems. Throwing a load of money on a single strategy can often lead to failure, and it’s best to have a broad view when it comes to the strategies needed to build your business. So where should your marketing budget be? spent? Let’s review the three main areas for the coming year…
Social Media
In today’s age, social media is everywhere and if you’re not already there, your business probably should be. Corn traditional media should not be neglected and digital and traditional marketing approaches should work together.
Knowing which social media platform to invest in is essential because not all platforms will be applicable to your business. Below is a list of some social media platforms:
- Youtube
- Snapchat
As you can see in the following chart, social media continues to provide brands with opportunities to connect with consumers on a wide variety of platforms, with the number of people online increasing year on year.
Smart information
If you’re unsure of the best place for your business to be, start by identifying your buyers and researching their most used social platforms. This means you’re not just guessing where your audience is and therefore you’ll be more likely to see engagement.
Building an online presence on major social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook isn’t as expensive as it is to stand out. Bloggers and influencers have perfected the art of building an audience, usually without any budget. To maximize your social media sales, without spending a lot of money, you should look at similar brands or services that have a large following and see the types of posts they publish.
Giving your brand a personal edge, sharing behind-the-scenes footage and using video will help generate interest in your product or service. Additionally, linking blog posts, collaborating with influencers, and giving away giveaways are all great ways to build and engage an audience.
SEO
You’ve probably heard many times that search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential digital marketing tool, but even if you have a basic understanding of what it entails, you may not have no clear idea of what exactly it is and how to do it for your business.
Several different elements make up SEO; keywords, content, off-page SEO, local SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Understanding each of them and how they work is key to why this tool is so important, but simply put, SEO makes your website more visible, which leads to more traffic, providing more opportunities for convert prospects into customers.
This is not an easy area for businesses to understand and if you don’t have an in-house expert, budget will need to be allocated for training, or outsourcing to a marketing agency may be more cost effective for some , with faster results.
Technology
Your marketing efforts should not only focus on attracting new customers, but also on retaining and interacting with your current customer base. technologies such as marketing automation software or customer relationship marketing (CRM) software is becoming essential in companies to effectively serve your customers.
They say 2020 is the year of personalizationwith customers demanding more personalized content and service than ever. One of the benefits of marketing software is the ability to do it at scale, also like aligning your sales and marketing teams, gaining improved customer insights so you can communicate more effectively, and improving ROI.
Hopefully this article has provided some insight into where your budget could be spent in 2020. Remember that every business and industry is different, so you need to figure out what’s best for your business and then allocate those funds based on the desired return on investment.
