If you wanna sell, you’ve gotta spend. This time-honoured saying rings true today, even for—or rather especially for Digital marketing. Now there is at least one person out there who thinks that there shouldn’t even be a distinction between a “digital marketing budget” and your good ol’ “marketing budget”. Whether you choose to make that distinction or not, the fact remains: Digital marketing is something every business should seriously consider investing in.

Because businesses are breaking the bank for digital. The numbers speak for themselves, really. For social media alone, advertising expenditures are set to hit $35.98 billion by 2017—and that’s just 16% of all global digital advertising. Consumers in every demographic show no signs at all of slowing their digital consumer habits. Against such a backdrop, businesses of every size find themselves finding ways to set some of their marketing budget aside for digital marketing efforts. 

So how much should you put into your digital marketing kitty?

First, let’s take a look at a traditional, not-techy-at-all generalisation:

• Your total marketing budget is somewhere between 5 to 15% of your total revenue.
• Your digital marketing budget should be somewhere between 10 to 50% of your total marketing budget.

But what should you spend it on?

Zeroing in on where that 10 to 50% goes can help you figure how much you will need overall. A good first step to take is to take a good look at any past digital marketing efforts you may have made. Anything that has clearly worked for you could be well worth investing in again. It may also be something worth investing more in the next time around. 

The roster of items on digital marketing budgets tend to vary between businesses. What follows are the investment areas that find their way into the budget most often:

• Search Engine Optimisation or SEO
• Pay Per Click or PPC
• Social Media
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing

Other items on other digital marketing budgets are

• Search Marketing
• Automated Marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Re-marketing
• Link Building

Still other businesses include these among their digital marketing costs:

• Customer Relationship Management or CRM
• Graphic design and photography
• Marketing email templates
• SEO auditing
• Strategy updates
• Interactive calculators such as those for cost and ROI

Whilst putting some or all of the above expenses on their laundry list of digital marketing to-do’s, these businesses also invest significantly in the following activities:   

• Understanding their target market and knowing their competitors
• Making websites mobile-friendly
• Producing marketing and advertising videos
• Producing apps that engage their customers
• Gaining insights and planning strategies based on analytics

It goes without saying that what ultimately stays or goes on a budget depends on the nature or needs of the business making it. It also depends on trends and statistics which may be relevant today but passé tomorrow.

But more or less, this is how most businesses divide up their digital marketing budget:

• 13% for Digital Advertising
• 12% for Content Marketing
• 12% for Website Development

This leaves 63% for various investments which may include

• Hardware
• Software
• Registration for the software
• Maintenance, Measurement and Monitoring
• Research
• People to take care of all this, whether they work for you in-house or out of an outside agency
• Training for these people, if they are in-house staffers

Now that you know exactly where your digital marketing dollars are going, you may now want to adjust the numbers you first came up with. You may also want to set aside some spending money on trying out new trends as they come along. After all, it simply won’t do to have your competitors leveraging the latest digital marketing strategies before you do.

How do you get the most digi-bang for your digi-buck?

This is a particularly pertinent question for businesses that may not have a whole lot of bucks to blow. It is the business of every business—and not just the ones on tight budgets—to make sure that any investments made bring in as many returns as possible. Also, knowing how far every allocation can go, can go a long way in preparing your budget beforehand.

Some sound stratagems for stretching your digital marketing spend include making sure that

• Your key message is consistent across all platforms
• You have good quality content
• You are reaching your target market and delivering what they need

You’ll know your digital marketing bang was loud enough if…

…you have quantifiable results. The good news is that the results of digital marketing are oh-so quantifiable. There are also several tools available that can help even smaller businesses find out how well their digital marketing efforts are working. Measuring the effectivity of these efforts will help you decide which activities keep their share of the budget—and whether those shares should be lion’s.

Make the most of your digital marketing budget!

Very simply, dedicating your resources to activities that are the most likely to produce the desired effects, may safely be said to have been maximised. That said, investing in the services of digital marketing professionals will most likely take your digital marketing dollar the furthest reach possible.

If the length and complexity of the foregoing lists are any indication, the needs of businesses engaging in digital marketing continue to become longer and more complex.  Trends and technology update faster than you can Snapchat, and keeping up alongside the daily grind of keeping your business running can be just as costly and time-consuming as not.

True digital marketing pro’s know—what works, what doesn’t, what’s hot and not—and can tailor-fit what they know to the individual needs of your business. In a word, it’s basically their job to stay up to date, and to make sure that your business stays ahead because of it.

Or again,you could just let the numbers do the talking: an in-house web content writer, for instance, would cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of USD50,000.00. And that writer can’t work alone—he will need a developer, a designer, a social media manager… and a digital marketing budget which, unless carefully considered, could make or break your business.

The post Breaking down the budget: How much to spend on digital marketing appeared first on NeoRanking.