Marketing Budget Calculator

How much should you be spending on marketing your business and how do you spread your marketing budget across the various channels? Our marketing budget calculator seeks to answer those questions.

Your marketing should take a balanced approach between investment in traditional offline strategies such as print adverts in publications, flyers etc and digital marketing. The calculator provides a figure for the overall marketing budget but then focuses on the breakdown of your digital marketing spend.

Spend too little in one particular area and you fail to make the most of the opportunity, spend too much and you could be wasting your money.

The calculator uses combined data obtained from a number of surveys and requires you to answer three simple questions.

Before we get to the calculator here’s a short definition of the various elements that the digital marketing budget should be shared across.

Search Advertising Budget

Search advertising sometimes referred to as pay-per-click or PPC advertising are the ads that are shown typically at the very top and bottom of a search engines results page such as Google. Advertisers will bid on keywords or key phrases that are relevant to the product or service that a business is marketing. Assuming the bid amount is high enough then the ad will be displayed to anybody searching for that keyword or phrase.

Display Advertising Budget

Display advertising, sometimes referred to as banner advertising and typically displayed on websites and on social media platforms consist of text, graphics, images and video.

Social Media Advertising Budget

Social media advertising as the name suggests are paid ads that are displayed on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pintrest. The quantity of user data held by these platforms makes it relatively easy to target your perfect demographic leading to higher conversion rates and improved returns on investment.

Email Marketing Budget

Email marketing whilst being as old as the hills still delivers a good return on investment. Keep in contact with past customers, provide interesting articles and updates but don’t oversell. It’s more about getting your customer to keep your business top of mind.

Look to include some form of lead capture on your website. Provide valuable information or coupons in exchange for an email address and then send an email at regular intervals with additional news and information as a way of nurturing your prospects and turning them into customers.

SEO & Website Content Budget

Your website should be one of your main methods for attracting new prospects and customers to your business but they’ve got to find you first. Appearing on the first page of Google’s search results page for your chosen keywords or phrases is a good start and that’s where search engine optimisation (SEO) and content marketing come into play.

It’s not a ‘one and done’ activity but rather an ongoing process and there are a couple of good reasons for this.  Firstly as your competitors improve their SEO they will start to outrank you so it’s a game of keeping out in front. Secondly, as Google gets smarter at understanding what people are searching for and delivering to them the results that will most likely answer there questions first time it’s getting smarter at understanding the content on your pages. It’s also been noted that websites with large amounts of content tend to rank better in the search results. So whether it’s via a blog or an industry related ‘Articles’ section on your website there is a need to continually add high quality content.

Marketing Technology Budget

Marketing technology refers to the digital systems and tools that marketers use to achieve their goals and objectives.  This is a massive sector with in excess of 5000 tools and systems falling under the banner of digital marketing technology. The following infographic demonstrates the complexity of this market.

Management & Consulting Budget

Management and consulting budget is the money paid to external digital marketing agencies to provide insight and guidance on your digital marketing strategies.  They will also manage all of the above elements such as improving your website SEO, creating and adding content to your website, creating landing pages for your lead magnets, managing your email campaigns and managing your advertising budget across search, banner and social media platforms.

The Marketing Budget Calculator

Answer these three questions in the form fields below.

1. What was your annual revenue for the last financial year
2. What percentage of your annual revenue is generated online.
3. A choice between how much are you prepared to spend. This figure is based on businesses surveyed that are similar in size to yours, some will be more conservative with their spend others will choose to spend more to realise increased gains.