Login
Book a Demo
How to Better Manage Your Marketing Budget
Extensive research and having clear marketing goals, among others, will help you manage your marketing budget, especially if you’re in the industrial world.
Naturally, most marketing executives have little background knowledge regarding finance.
So you’re not alone if the idea of having a balanced budget demotivates you every morning before you get to work.
You likely think your only role is to grow and build a strong brand. Unfortunately, that’s not true.
As a chief marketing officer (CMO) or a marketing manager, you’re in charge of a sizable amount of company funds.
So besides growing and building a solid brand, you need to spend money wisely.
This is because a practical marketing budget will help you create an effective marketing strategy for your brand. And with the ever-changing marketing dynamics, your marketing strategy must evolve and be effective.
But how do you achieve that? What are some of the crucial aspects of creating an effective marketing budget?
This can be scary if you’re handling industrial or manufacturing companies. But this shouldn’t worry you.
This article aims to give you a clear game plan for effectively managing your marketing expenses, especially if you’re in the manufacturing industry.
It’s a good idea to learn about your industry from the outside in before you go into the planning process. And the only way to achieve this is by sparing time to do thorough research on your company.
For the research to be effective, you need to understand the following:
Besides, it’s essential to understand your buyers’ journey to tailor a memorable experience during the campaigns.
For instance, if you’re in the manufacturing industry, you must understand the buying stage of your audience. This gives you a good idea of the best marketing platforms and campaigns you can leverage to appeal to them.
If they’re in the awareness stage, you won’t need to push the conversion content to them, but rather educational content. But if they’re already your existing clients, the retention and advocacy stage will suit them better.
Also, you need to know your monthly revenue from traffic, leads, and conversions.
It is best to understand the costs and values of each of these manufacturing marketing expenses. You can leverage tools like Google Analytics if you want an in-depth wealth of valuable data.
You can also work with a marketing agency for manufacturers if you need more extensive research. They’re better placed to give you detailed and practical insights on how you can claim your stake in the marketplace.
After gathering all the relevant information, you may properly choose practical ways to handle your marketing budget.
To maximise your marketing budget, you need to set clear goals.
The goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and time-bound (SMART). Setting SMART goals helps you to avoid creating vague goals.
For effective budget planning, boosting a brand’s visibility sounds so general and vague.
However, you can narrow it down to increasing social media following by 20% for this budgetary term.
This is a better alternative as it indicates how you plan to boost visibility and improve engagement on your social pages. Additional SMART goals include the following:
Clear goals are vital for managing your marketing budget.
Therefore, a goal-driven approach will help you be accountable for how you spend money.
Besides, this gives you an upper hand when bargaining with your CFO on why they need to approve the budget for your team.
SMART goals are more effective since it’s easy to back up your claim with evidence of your marketing effectiveness, like significant ROI.
You can work with an industrial marketing agency for your manufacturing business. Working with experienced personnel will strive to provide your business with maximum ROI. Besides, an effective manufacturing marketing agency can help increase your spending goals.
Coming up with your budget list is vital if you want to achieve your marketing budget goals. Ensure you have a detailed list of every marketing activity and task you plan for your business.
Let’s take a look at some practical illustrations of how your budget list may appear for a manufacturing company:
Besides the list being particular and doable, ensure these activities closely relate to SMART goals. The only notable difference is that with this specific list, you can budget money for it.
Some of the marketing-related topics that the list can cover include the following:
Additionally, you might want to consider concentrating on brand recognition strategies.
This is a valuable strategy for both startups and existing companies. The above list clearly defines what you have to do and what you’d prefer to accomplish.
Remember to include your staff’s salaries when planning your marketing budget. Moreover, it’s advisable to budget for hidden costs when preparing your marketing budget.
For instance, you need to budget for any possible monthly subscription fees or purchases you may have made during the last spending period that may reflect during the current spending period.
Naturally, most employees can’t access business funds for a good reason. But this means that it will always be more complex for your marketing team to spend.
You can categorise marketing payments into three categories:
Managers may fail to keep track of these payments since various strategies are unrelated.
Managers or CMOs may manage each online payment. But it’s prudent for all employees to submit their expense reports in case they attended a meeting or visited a client.
You can leverage a centralised expenditure management system to simplify these processes.
The main benefit of these platforms is that they can centralize your payment options and help you balance the books. Therefore, viewing employee spending in real-time is easy, allowing you to make better financial decisions.
Platforms like these are heaven-sent if you’re always on the go and want to manage a sizable budget.
When setting a marketing budget, many companies make simple errors that cost them money and lose chances.
Business owners frequently don’t give their marketing enough thought.
A marketing budget is an essential tool for knowing what you’re doing and how to improve results.
But before creating, you need to ensure you’ve done extensive research, set SMART goals, listed your budget items, and learned how to spend effectively.
Doing this with the help of a manufacturing marketing agency will help you maximize your budget and achieve your company’s bottom line.
Dan has hands-on experience in digital marketing since 2007. He has been building teams and coaching others to foster innovation and solve real-time problems. Dan also enjoys photography and traveling.
