6 min to read

How to Calculate a Digital Marketing Budget?

The secret of being a millionaire is not actually working all day till you can't do it anymore. In that way, you won't even enjoy the fruits of your effort. Instead of hard-working with no rest, it is wiser to know how to spend your money to return more value to your company.

Building a budget can be confusing for many beginners, even professionals out there. While some articles say you should only spend 6% or 50% of your digital marketing income, there is no golden rule to help every business. In fact, we must be extremely sincere, even if this answer doesn't fulfill all your expectations: Your marketing budget really depends on your own company's capacity.

But on the bright side, learning to build a budget will generate all the benefits your company needs to keep growing. Social media annual revenue has grown up to $93.75 billion just in the US by 2018, which means there is a lot of money you can earn doing things correctly.

You don't need to be an expert in economics; even having good abilities with numbers, you need to come with us, and we will show you exactly how to calculate your marketing budget?

Want to find out?

Keep scrolling down!

Things to focus on your Marketing Budget

Previous Results

A great sentence that works for every aspect of life is... "We learn from our mistakes." That said, it is crucial to evaluate your previous results to improve and build a new budget and marketing plan. Digital marketing allows you to keep track of your views, clicks, and, pretty important, your return on investment.

If your return on investment for your ads got 70% and email campaigns got 100%, the most obvious action is to invest more in bringing more money to the business. This doesn't mean you will break up with your ads, and the marketing relationship doesn't work like this. Instead, you are going to spend less on this strategy. Also, it is advised to do a competitive analysis to remain a step ahead of the competition.

Whenever you evaluate your ROI, it is important to test all the possible advertisements until you find the one that makes your customers engage more with your product.

Source: YouTube.

Clear Goals

-So where do we captain?

-Well, we... I don't know...

-...

There is no big plan with no big goal; that's a fact. To improve your company, you must evaluate your good, see where you want to improve, and set a clear goal for this new campaign. Be specific!

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) a way to delimitate which is the clear goal for your business. Instead of saying something generic like getting more clients and sales, put a last to your goals: increase clients to 4,000 and sales by 50%.

Now that you know where your "final destination" is, it is easier to take your budget and team to that achievement.

Tools like Google Ads or Facebook Ad Manager can give you estimated results before you even start your new plan, giving you valuable forecasts like cost per click (CPC) and conversion.

Source: Unsplash/ Immo Wegmann

Advertisement Tools

Whether you are a Digital Agency or an E-Commerce, your budget will depend on the number of digital tools you will need to engage with them.

If you are a Digital Marketing Agency, you need a good website, internet advertising on other webs and even ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. In the case of E-Commerce, you could invest in some tools Amazon offers to reach more customers over your digital store.

For much digital business, you must convert, which increases your marketing budget because you have to use analytical software and other marketing tools. You could also use TikTok marketing to promote your campaigns.

Source: Unsplash/ Windows

Demographic

Before going online, it is useful to know the number of competitors in your area. Good and Facebook help you do this through bidding, which helps you see how many businesses target the same demographic.

Once you know this, you can check their tactics and strategies and measure how much they are spending to reduce or increase your budget.

Source: Pixabay/ Miko Grisendi

Inbound Marketing

With Inbound Marketing, you don't find a customer's attention by just appearing with your ads. In this case, you create a step-by-step experience for them to find you.

Right now, as you are reading this article, we are making Inbound Marketing by giving you valuable information so you can succeed with your business. This marketing tactic is about giving informative, entertaining, and educative content to your customers.

While creating a budget, you could also look at these Top 10 CRM tools in the market.

Source: Youtube.

So, talking about your budget, inbound marketing requires manual work tools, software, and tactics like:

Marketing Strategy: full-time Digital Marketing specialists tend to cost $87,000 per year. Their jobs include content creation, planning implementation, and teamwork supervision.
Website: This one can be free with tools like Amazon Web Services or WordPress. Even though your company needs a more refined website or app, you should try to find a web developer that can help you with the job, and their cost ranges from $1,000 to $3,000.
Content creators: Your social media needs cool content and design. The average annual salary of a web designer content creator is $54,000. Freelancers, on the other hand, could lower their cost by $50 for one article. Web pages like Upwork or Freelancers allow you to find good professionals.
Social Media Marketing: A social media plan for your Instagram, Facebook, or even YouTube is needed to engage with a wider audience. That's why you need to hire a social media specialist. In the US, these professionals cost up to $64,000 a year.

The cost of Marketing Tools and Software

Tracking and reporting: If you are looking for a free tool to track your website development Google Analytics is the perfect fit for your business. In case you want to invest in finding better results, HubSpot's professional marketing package is about $9,600 a year.
Social Media Management: Depending on how many channels your business uses, you have to schedule many posts or content for your social media. Hootsuite and Buffer offer a free version for just one account, but you have to pay if you need to manage many of them simultaneously.
Mailing Tools: Tools like MailChimp are perfect for sending emails to all of your customers. The price depends on the number of users you have, and it can be from $75 per month, which ends up being $900 annually.
Web Design: A .com domain costs about $9 a year, while platforms like WordPress or Wix can cost from $5 a month. If you are a wealthy businessman, you could try using Joomla as your Content Management System, which costs about $1,500 a year. This option comes with hosting provider, design, and some other minor costs. With a lower price, you can try with 10Page with plans from $120 a year.

Source: Unsplash/ Kelly Sikkema

Outbound Marketing

When you do outbound marketing, you are kinda needy, don't take it personally. It means you try a little harder to reach out to your customers. Let´s correct, you are not needy. You are more persuasive...

Every good budget and marketing strategy consists of mixing both inbound and outbound. Picking just one is a big mistake.

Let's see what tools and how much do they cost for your marketing budget.

Here are 5 tips on effective A/B testing.

Source: Youtube.

Social media ADS

Each social media has its unique marketing tools to make your marketing efforts more successful, whether it's an ad on Facebook, paid advertisement on YouTube, or even an Influencer of your niche. Their pricing mechanism varies depending on impressions, clicks, or purchases.

Supposed you want to get 500 new clients. Your strategy choice is Pay Per Click, and you pay $1 per click. You get 10 new clients that contact, only $10 spent. Now you must multiply the number of clients, and your total budget is $5,000 in this specific case. Do your own math depending on the number of clients you want to get.

Social Media could help you flourish your business.

If this sounds too risky for you, many professionals recommend spending just 5% of your budget on ads. You could also sell your products on Facebook Marketplace for localized sales.

Source: Unsplash/ Austin Distel

Search ADS

Remember, Search Engine Optimization is really important. Appearing at the top of a search engine takes a lot of strategy and time, but, our friend, the money could help us achieve our goals much faster.

SEO companies tend to cost $500 per month.

Let´s Calculate your Marketing Budget

Quick tips first, if you are a new company, it is recommended to take 12-20% of gross revenue while established ones can invest 6-12%.

Now make a list of how much you will spend on all the aspects we mentioned before on Inbound and Outbound marketing.

Keep track of your Return On Investment to see what is really working for you and the things that are not going well. Evaluate how you can improve them. Take a good look at the marketing of your competitors to get some good ideas you could use.

Make an annual budget according to the analysis of your last year's budget.

In CodeDesign, we have a great tool to help you calculate your marketing budget, go and check it out.

Source: CodeDesign.

If you are starting with your business, you should invest little until you learn how to handle all your expenses.

According to a 10Web Blog, you should spend up to $250.000 a year for your complete marketing team. This includes your marketing manager, social media manager, graphic designer, and some freelance jobs.

Also, pay attention to your website. If you spend some good money, like $1,000, with a management platform, email marketing software, and social media management tools, you can say that your agency or business is up to compete with the great ones.

We help you with your marketing strategy and show you how to spend wisely your money, so those accounts can keep growing.

Until the next time, see you with new digital and marketing trends!

CodeDesign is a performance digital marketing(internet advertising agency) and Amazon agency. We help clients worldwide in creating a digital marketing strategy and optimizing how they use digital marketing channels. For Amazon marketing, we help vendors and sellers in Amazon listing optimization and creating an Amazon marketing strategy.

We are a leading

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Feel free to contact us to see an unprecedented growth of your business.