How to Develop Marketing Plan Budget
Creating a marketing plan budget assumes that you already have a good marketing plan and you understand what is a marketing plan budget.
8 Tips to Develop Better Marketing Plan Budget:
Many small businesses as well as large organization (equally both B2B and B2C) make the mistake of limiting their marketing budget for marketing communications costs such as advertising, PR / public relations, direct mail and promotions.
A true marketing plan includes the upfront planning, communications expenditures and ongoing monitoring and tracking of your marketing efforts.
If you don’t track and monitor your marketing investments and you are not continuously evaluating results they create for your business – that means you are relying on intuition and leaving money on the table.
- Include all three components of marketing strategy in your budget plan to spend your dollars with maximum efficiency and generate maximum sales.
- Create a list of the different segments of your marketing efforts. Include research, testing, creative production, communications and tracking.
- Estimate the costs involved in gathering market research. Market research includes efforts such as developing a customer profile and examining your competitors. Include administering surveys, buying research studies and hiring a consultant.
- Estimate the costs of testing marketing strategies. Include product giveaways, focus groups, creating different versions of your product, selling new items in limited locations and follow-up surveys.
- Estimate the costs of a communications campaign. Include the costs of creative design for packaging, ads, websites and other collateral materials. Calculate the costs for your desired media buys, such as print ads, website banners and TV and radio commercials. Include expenses for mail, trade shows, public relations, contests, promotions and the cost of building and maintaining a website.
- Estimate the costs of tracking and monitoring your communications efforts. This can include the purchase of a website statistics package, visiting retailers who sell your product or conducting customer mail or telephone surveys.
- Add up the total estimated costs. Determine if you can afford the total price of the marketing plan. If not, review each category to see where you can cut back.
- Create a spending formula that ties marketing budget to a percentage of sales. If your current marketing plan is working, then the more you sell, the more you should consider spending on your marketing efforts. If your sales drop, spending plan tied to sales can put in a place a brake that will alert you to reexamine each aspect of your entire marketing plan.