Smart management of your marketing budget is a challenge in the current scenario not only because of the fact that your own money is involved but also more of the fact that your competitors are involved who seem to be doing the best out of the same budget. In order to get the most of your marketing budget, it is important for businesses to research on their own budget and measure results and performances accordingly. Understanding what percentage of your entire marketing budget is allocated to what, will make your task even easier.
You may require experts, if your business is no smaller in size or if your business is operating on a larger scale. How to connect these with the modelling pattern of your business? It is possible with attribution modelling but various other considerations also do come into the picture.
Attribution modelling is one of the ways that can help you in measuring success while you try to drive a prospect through all the stages. This is one method that would rather help you identify the tools that work best in driving your potential customers through your sales channel in the fastest manner. Now here, if you choose to take “fractional” approach, the impact on your study and performance will only be better.
So now the question arises, how can you actually create a fractional attribution model that can help you further your business performance? We have the answer for most (if not all) your concerns, read out.
Map Content
The very first thing that you will need to do is to logically place your contents as well as the channels depending on how and where they actually seem to fall in customers’ journey. Find out whether your social media existence also falls into the conversation stages and hence into the channels in your customer life cycle phase. Once you have convincingly plotted both your content and your channels, you can very well move to your next step.
Weigh Contents and Channels
Businesses will often require weighing the contents and the channels depending on the impact they would have on the leads. In order to do that effectively, businesses can very well choose among the parameters – “low”, “medium”, “high” and even select a relatively more advanced parameter with a scale of 1-10.
Make sure that you apply these weights depending on the success they fetched you while you tried to move the prospect to a particular piece of channel or content. For example, you can also choose to weigh the blog post higher than a social media channel like twitter in the customer conversation stage – simply because it is responsible for moving the leads to the webinar most of the times!
Spending on Conduits Scoring highest – a Priority?
Businesses can start with signing up for newsletters, connecting on a professional channel like Linkedin, conducting useful online demo, downloading white papers and last but not the least, interacting online with salespersons.
Make sure that you realize if this turned out to be your highest weighted customer journey. When you get convincing results start prioritizing and distributing your budgets depending on the channels that fetch you better outcomes. This would mean that you’re on your way to making the most of your marketing budget, even if it’s limited. However, it should also be kept in mind that the journey you address as being “ideal” actually also varies with the persona and personal preferences of each buyer involved.
If you feel this is really working in your favor the way it should, don’t forget to repeat the process depending on the segment you choose to target.
How much does your Marketing Budget require?
How much your marketing budget really requires depends on a variety of things and some of the factors to consider are:
- Type of business (product/services business, exclusively online business, etc.)
- Customer reach
- Financial reach
- And lot more
A lot of entrepreneurs may still have different answers and preferences and advocate on different approaches, depending on their requirements.
There are plenty of facts that suggest the amount of money and focus you should be putting in your marketing budget. Here are a few questions, the answers to which shall lead you to a convincing point that would suggest how much should you really be putting on your marketing budget.
- What has been working for your business and what did not work out as an investment?
- How many years have you been in this business and what does your experience say?
- What is the sales revenue you usually expect from your business?
- What is the recommended percentage of your sales revenue?
- How are you planning to market your service or product?
- Does your business require having a social media existence too?
- What are the factors that guide you to invest? Are you doing it the right way?
- What are the mistakes in budgeting and investment that your business has made in the past?
- Have you learned from your mistakes that you committed in the past?
The marketing budget is and will continue to remain a crucial element of your business but now more and more companies are tightening their belts and constantly focusing on reducing their budgets. Whether you have a limited or a good budget to invest, knowing how and where you should spend is going to guarantee success in the long run. Marketing budget can be a huge task to take on but with the right approach, research and analysis you’re surely going to let it project as a strength of your online business.
Evans is a content marketer and blogger. He has contributed few articles on leading UK based supplier of sack trucks – Sack-Truck.com.