Every year, there’s a strong probability that a large portion of your company’s marketing budget will go toward digital marketing, regardless of whether you use traditional methods, keep up with the latest trends, or have a unique formula based on specific requirements.
We polled over 500 CMOs as part of our study on the evolution of marketing, and we found that 58% of them are switching from traditional to digital marketing for their budgets.
The precise financial amount of your digital marketing budget will vary depending on factors like business type, size, and industry; however, you can learn from strategies and tactics to maximize spend.
To get the most out of your company’s digital marketing budget and achieve your goals, here are eight helpful tips.
- Ascertain What is Included in the Umbrella of Digital Marketing
You must understand which components are deemed “digital marketing” and which are not if you are to maximize your budget. For numerous businesses, any online activity is classified as digital marketing; however, not all services or activities may be included in this category.
Selecting what is and is not included will help you concentrate on the appropriate platforms. A few things to consider are:
Search engine optimization (SEO), is a useful tool for increasing traffic and generating qualified leads, even though some seasoned marketers may not view it as a marketing endeavor. Check out this free checklist and some helpful SEO reporting tools.
Social Media: Individuals in your target market are probably active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. For many businesses, social media is a major source of qualified leads.
When it comes to online marketing, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is frequently regarded as the gold standard because it allows you to target specific demographics and you only have to pay when someone clicks on your advertisement. (If you need assistance with your campaigns, check out this PPC for eCommerce tracker.)
Campaigns via email (inbound marketing): Email marketing is still a useful method of reaching consumers online because it is a “pull” strategy as opposed to a “push” one.
Digital Display (banner ads, online video, etc.): Video is starting to take off as the next big thing in marketing, and modern banner ads are targeted and non-intrusive.
Creation of Content (blogs and website pages) – It’s simple to overlook content creation when considering your marketing budget, but producing excellent content is essential to the whole.
- Determine the websites visited by the audience you want to reach.
Understanding where your customers spend their online time and getting to know them better will help you optimize your budget. In this manner, you can maximize the return on your investment and allocate your resources to the right areas. Marketers are frequently taken aback by the findings of this type of research because they may have preconceived notions about the locations of their ideal clientele.
It would not be a wise use of marketing funds, for instance, if your business spends a large portion of its digital marketing budget using LinkedIn, only to discover that the majority of your clients spend most of their time on Facebook.
Your marketing team can monitor where your target audience spends their time, how long they stay, and what drives them to leave by using analytics (like GA4) and advanced metrics. To know what you are looking for, you must first create a persona of your ideal customer to obtain this information.
You should have personas to work with if you have a budget. Make thorough personas of your ideal client or customer, including their age, gender, occupation, income, family situation, interests, hobbies, and anything else pertinent, if that hasn’t happened for some reason.
- Examine Several Channels
Digital marketing can be a fickle endeavor; what is effective for one marketer might not be for another.
Your business should have set key performance indicators (KPIs) early in the budgeting process. By testing through multiple channels and comparing results to your KPIs, you can better understand what is and isn’t working. It’s possible that one channel is generating a substantially higher conversion rate than the others, or that one channel has a substantially lower or higher cost per conversion (CPC).
By testing through a variety of channels, you can take advantage of opportunities and steer clear of areas where you’re not seeing meaningful results. At this point, you can focus on the channels that are giving you the best return on investment (ROI) to maximize your digital marketing spend. The 80/20 rule is probably applicable, or depending on your industry, even 90/10.
- Multi-Channel Advertising
Remarketing is simple to overlook but can yield a respectable return on investment for not too much money.
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is the process of displaying advertisements to people who have visited your website or clicked on one of your ads but did not complete the conversion. Your advertisements will now appear when they browse other websites and platforms because they have already indicated an interest.
Remarketing did not track website visitors across channels in the past. However, by using cross-channel remarketing, users can see follow-up ads on Facebook or Twitter after clicking on a Google ad (here’s a beginner’s guide).
By providing prospects with two or three opportunities to engage with your brand following their initial contact, your organization can make the most out of their budget. Like any other PPC advertisement, you only have to pay if someone clicks on it.
- Analyze Trends to Maintain Your Edge
To get ideas on how to make the most out of your digital marketing budget, see what other senior-level marketers in your field are doing. Providing a higher return on their marketing budget is ranked as the top challenge facing 2023 by 20% of senior marketing executives and CMOs surveyed.
It’s not that you should copy your rivals exactly, but being aware of what they’re doing online will help you determine what needs to be changed to stay competitive.
For instance, understanding where competitors allocate their money and how they maximize their budgets will help you set your own, especially if you want to take market share away from them or if they have already gained a sizable portion of the market.
- Reallocate as Required
Although many marketers may think of allocation and optimization as two different things, in the digital age, being able to reallocate your budget as circumstances change is crucial to optimizing your marketing spend.
This is why it makes sense to have some leeway when creating a budget. Results are frequently visible right away, so you should be able to seize opportunities when they arise and stop losing money if a particular strategy isn’t working.
Let’s take an example where all of your customers are posting videos on TikTok. As you try to interact with them on TikTok, this might create a new opportunity for paid advertising or even content creation.
Here’s where having a digital marketing budget toolkit can help, as you can change the amounts as needed.
- Test and refine continuously
Optimization is a continuous process, particularly in digital marketing. It’s crucial to continue testing even after you’ve chosen which channels to concentrate your efforts on because there are a plethora of tools available to test and measure outcomes.
Changes as small as a few words in a campaign can have drastically different effects. For instance, if an email campaign is yielding a positive return on investment, a straightforward alteration to the email sequence or a new subject line could increase it even further.
Your marketing team must continuously test new ideas, strategies, and concepts while also fine-tuning campaigns across all platforms if the aim is to always get the most out of your digital marketing budget.
Generally speaking, a small tweak to a campaign won’t increase costs, so if it yields a higher return on investment than it did previously, you’ve successfully maximized your marketing budget while getting better results.
- Verify That Marketing and Sales Are Balanced
The marketing and sales teams must collaborate to achieve your objectives because optimizing your digital results will also enable you to make the most of your budget.
A lot of online marketing campaigns involve online purchases and no face-to-face interaction with a sales representative. However, to turn leads into paying customers, these must line up if your sales funnel involves the sales team. Sales and marketing cannot function as a cohesive unit or produce the necessary results without cooperation.
In summary
Setting and optimizing your company’s digital marketing budget involves a lot of variables, many of which are erratic and subject to sudden changes. But by employing these tactics, you should be able to make sure that your money goes farther and is spent on the channels that produce outcomes.