Deciding how much to Budget for Marketing is one of the most important tasks you will do each year, but it’s often difficult to know if you’re getting it right. Too high a budget and you could take resources away from other areas of your business where they’re needed, too little and your sales could take a nosedive.

Once you’ve determined what your organisation’s overall Marketing Budget is going to be, the next big decision you’ll need to make is where to spend it. Looking at where other marketers are putting their marketing spend can be extremely helpful for anyone who’s trying to determine the top marketing activities to invest in.

According to a recent report from digital marketers GreenHat, in 2017 overall marketing budgets haven’t changed very much from 2016. The report surveyed over 300 marketers in Australia and half the survey respondents expected to maintain their current levels of funding, while 41% of Australian marketers were planning to increase their marketing budget in 2017.

In 2017, the main areas for marketing spend are website, content and email, indicating that search visibility and online marketing take priority for the majority of marketers. Content marketing is also still going strong with over half of respondents committing money to content creation in 2017. Other strategies that are featuring heavily in the survey respondents’ budgets include marketing automation and social media marketing.

Tracking return on marketing investment still a challenge for many

For marketers in larger organisations it’s often crucial to find ways to communicate the return on marketing investment to internal and external stakeholders, but this is not always as easy as it might sound.

Measuring marketing return on investment can be a challenge for even the savviest marketers, as results can’t always be measured in a quantitative manner. Because it can be complex, measuring and explaining ROI was not a task that all the surveyed marketers felt comfortable with. 29% of the marketers in the survey said they didn’t feel confident communicating any return on investment relating to their marketing activities.

In terms of the activities which generated the highest ROI, survey respondents indicated that internet, email and event based channels performed the best, while older marketing strategies like direct mail and telemarketing brought the lowest ROI. This year also saw the emergence of influencer marketing for the first time but it is too soon to see any definitive returns at this stage.

Setting and tracking your marketing budget are crucial steps to a successful marketing strategy. By knowing how much you have to spend and identifying the marketing activities that bring you the best return on investment, you can make the most of your marketing budget and avoid wasting your resources on unprofitable marketing strategies.

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