How to get better marketing results by measuring and prioritizing your activities? Here's what you should know about developing a marketing budget.

Step 1 - Identify Your Business Goals

When you create your marketing budget breakdown, you need to determine your short-term and long-term business goals: your marketing plan /marketing strategy. You need to know what you want to achieve, so you can set a budget that allows you to achieve those goals.

Understandably, you're marketing in the first place to create either a sales funnel or direct sales that boost gross revenue, and the key to that is to get specific with your goals. Also, make sure your business goals are specific and smart.

Step 2 - Understand Your Target Audience

It is very important to have a clear and specific idea of what your target audience is. To do so, you can gather and develop your consumer persona. When developing your consumer personas, get specific, and let data be your guide. These are some ways to gather data to help you develop your consumer personas:

  • Survey your current customers.
  • Interview people you think may be in your target audience.
  • Use Google Analytics to determine audience demographics.
  • Use Facebook Insights to track user interaction with your brand.

Step 3 - Understand Your Market and Competition

You need to know where you fit in your market to build an effective marketing budget plan. When you understand how you stack up against your competition, you can better establish which strategies you need to use to compete with them.

It is suggested to do a competitor analysis to see how your competition performs. It can definitely help you determine which strategies you’ll need to budget to drive success.

Step 4 - Choose Your Marketing Channels

An essential component of preparing a marketing budget is choosing your strategies. You don’t need to be 100% sure about the strategies you want to use, but you should have an idea of which strategies seem to be the best fit for your business. There are numerous digital marketing strategies you can use, including: SEO, E-mail marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, social media advertising, ect.

You’ll want to have an idea of which strategies you want to use for your business when creating a marketing budget. When you know which strategies you want to invest in, you can determine how they will fit into your marketing budget plan. That brings us to our next critical component of how to plan a marketing budget.