Entrepreneurs tend to either spend WAY too much on marketing, or not enough.
Creating a strategic marketing budget helps us all, whether we tend toward sinking bales of money into our marketing efforts or pinching every penny!
When you’ve got a plan in place, know your reasons to spend, and can track the results, it keeps marketing spend on-target and in-check.
Still not convinced you need a marketing budget? Read on, my lovelies, and I’ll have you convinced in no time!
A Marketing Budget Focuses Your Efforts on Product Awareness
Word of mouth is great, but it’ll never take the place of a long-term strategy for building awareness of your offerings. Relying on organic marketing is definitely cheaper, but it’s also totally unreliable.
If you want to help your audience know, value, and trust your products or services, you need to control that story.
You need to make intentional choices about where to market your products and what’s said about them.
Creating a marketing budget means setting aside the money to build campaigns and the energy to launch them. And that leads to increased product awareness.
A Marketing Budget Encourages You to Leverage Influence
It’s easy to forget that marketing encompasses a truly vast number of activities. It’s not just Facebook ads and email campaigns.
Use the influencer marketing strategy to leverage your colleagues’ audiences and connect with potential clients you couldn’t reach on your own.
By allotting marketing money to influencer spending, you can spread awareness and knowledge about your products even farther, and do so while building great relationships with your business peers.
A Marketing Budget Forces You to Think Strategically
Your marketing budget isn’t just a device for keeping your ad spending under control, it is the direct link between your promotional plans and taking real action.
By creating it, you and your team are forced to discuss the strategies you want to execute and plan out how you’ll put them in motion.
That’s incredibly valuable.
Of course, actually creating the budget can feel overwhelming.
Where to start? How to ballpark costs?
Which marketing strategies will work for your audience and your business model?
You can consult sites like U.S. Small Business Administration to get the process rolling or research their information or work with your email marketing provider. Constant Contact and Mailchimp both have tons of resources and recommendations for businesses of all sizes and structures.
And don’t forget to loop in your virtual assistant! I’ve got lots of tips on how to outsource your marketing tasks like a pro, as well as advice on which business and marketing workloads are ideal for your VA.
Need more guidance?
Try my project kit Automation & Systems for More Clients, Cash, and Freedom! It includes a step-by-step marketing plan, along with templates and checklists to help you and your assistant tackle your to-do list with ease.
xoxo
Melissa
PS. Not sure what you should outsource in your business? Click here to take my free quiz to find out the #1 task that you need to outsource.
