If you are someone charged with allocating marketing bucks, it’s quite obvious that you may be pulling your hair. It’s an arduous and daunting task deciding how much of the budget to spend annually on marketing activities.

Though everyone in the marketing team wants a big share of the pie, sadly, there’s not enough pie to please them all.

With so much pressure from different departments, how do you go about allocating your marketing budget? Whether it’s running paid campaigns through Google ads or hiring Instagram influencers, you do need money to get your name out there.

If you are someone who is responsible for a company’s marketing budget and are struggling to make ends meet, let’s take you through some proven steps that make marketing budget allocation a breeze for companies of all sizes.

How to Allocate your Marketing Budget?

1. Decide your goal: Before launching a marketing campaign, it is important for you to define why you are doing this. Ask yourself what you intend to achieve with particular marketing activity. Is it lead generation or sales? Based on your goal, you will be able to allocate your budget better.
2. Create a list of advertising platforms: Once you have a rough idea of your advertising goals, you need to decide where you want to put your money. Instead of only restricting yourself to traditional media, think of digital and new media as well. More than anything, don’t just allocate resources because your competitor is doing it. Put your money on mediums where your target group spends most of their time. We would suggest starting with social media marketing and then moving on to SEO and on-site marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing and OOH media.
3. Costs and potential ROI: The number of advertising mediums available today can be quite overwhelming. Thus, before you divide up your budget, check the viability of the medium. Consider the expected costs and the potential ROI you can achieve. If it matches your goals, it’s a good idea to put money into it.
4. Track results: Whether you launch a marketing campaign with a luxury budget or a small-scale Facebook campaign, measuring results is invaluable. Check if your webpage visits have increased after the campaign or if there is a spurt in the number of app downloads. If you are familiar with Google Analytics, you can easily track your online conversions.
5. Optimise budget based on results: As you take baby steps into your first marketing campaign, you’ll already get a fair idea of what’s working and what’s not. This is when you can decide how you want to move forward with your future campaigns. If you discover that a digital campaign yielded better results than an offline campaign, then you must reallocate your budget from the latter to the former.

Marketing budget allocation is not about how much you can afford to spend but rather a process that helps you allocate your available budget across the best channels to yield fruitful results.