Allocating Your Marketing Budget

How much of your marketing budget are you allocating to online customer acquisition?

A fully rounded approach to marketing a local business should include a mix of both traditional and digital marketing. That said, in recent years, the allocation of marketing budgets between traditional and digital has been steadily moving in one direction.

In a recent study conducted by the Digital Marketing Institute respondents indicated, almost unanimously, that they have increased their digital marketing budget in recent years and will continue to make incremental increases through 2020.

In the same study 63% of those surveyed indicated that they intend to keep traditional media budgets flat or take decreases in order to allocate more money to digital.

And there are good reasons why you might want to allocate more of your marketing budget to digital marketing:

Lower Costs – The cost of digital marketing can be significantly less than traditional marketing.

Advanced Audience Segmentation – It’s easier to target specific groups of people based on a number of factors such as gender, age, location, interests, life events.

Reach Doesn’t Depend On Your Budget – It’s possible to produce content that goes viral and is shared with no extra expense to you.

Two-way Communication – The interactive nature of digital channels provides the means for a conversation to take place between the business owner and the customer or prospective customer. Relationships lead to sales.

Flexibility – Digital marketing campaigns can be modified and optimised relatively quickly. If a campaign isn’t performing then make changes until it is.

Better Measurement of Return On Investment (ROI) – The tools available to digital marketers are far more precise. They gather together the essential metrics that allow you to judge the effectiveness of a campaign and more accurately calculate the ROI.

Customer Value – Digital marketing should create value for your customers. It should satisfy their needs and solve their problems. This approach starts to build trust with your prospects and helps to convert them into customers.

Permanent Content – Content can take many forms from blogs, podcasts, posts on social media, ebooks and copy on your website amongst others. Once published, your content will remain available until removed. It will always be there, ready to engage new prospects.

With paid advertising on platforms like Facebook or search engines such as Google you can determine the length of your campaigns. Once you reach an acceptable ROI you can keep the ads running for as long as you maintain that ROI.

If you’re not using the internet to market your local business you’re missing a significant opportunity. If you’ve already started to use the digital medium to communicate with your prospects could you be doing more?

Here at Bubyli we can help you to understand how a digital marketing strategy could be applied to your business. Get in touch if you would like to learn more about how we can help you.