Organizations and businesses are busy planning their budgets for the upcoming year. Not exactly sure about how much your company should allocate to marketing? Before you begin your marketing wish list, evaluate how much your company has invested on marketing versus performance and benefit. It’s important to scrutinize costs and understand the benefits received from them. Once you’ve completed this step, take a hard look at products, services or ideas that will produce results in your marketing program.
Below are six items Global Marketing Solutions recommends you include in your 2016 marketing budget.
- Take a critical look at the content your brand has produced. You’ll need highly visual or organic content at your fingertips, such as branded graphics and memes. Creating highly shareable content that accomplishes a business objective is a craft, and you need to invest in the creation of it.
- Organic reach in social and blog content shouldn’t be a single strategy. Set aside specific funds for amplifying and promoting all of your content, whether it’s by post or through ongoing programs.
- Be sure you have a video budget for 2016. According to GMS founder and CEO, April Boone, “The data is incontrovertible that video will continue to play a large role in marketing in the coming year, so be sure you have money set aside for production as well as for costs of distribution and promotion.”
- To be innovative, you are going to need a budget that has room to try new things. Leave some wiggle room for prospects and test projects. New social media opportunities continuously arise. Make sure your company is taking full advantage. Think ahead and earmark funds so that your brand can have the budget to try something on a small scale in 2016. This way you can see if it works for your business.
- Be prepared for emergencies. “Include contingency money for ‘the unknown incoming.’ You never know what crisis or need may arise in a given year; always hold back some dollars for the need to meet that situation head on,” says April Boone.
- Services that are geo-location based, such as remessaging and remarketing, are also key areas to include in your 2016 budget.
We want to hear from you! What tips do you have to share with us about planning a marketing budget?
