DOWNLOAD YOUR MARKETING BUDGET TEMPLATE

If you want to start getting serious about your digital marketing budgets, then looking at what you’re currently spending is essential.  

What to look for

Make a note of anything you put money towards promoting your business, such as:

- Digital ads and PR
- In-house or external marketing personnel
- Digital assets (your website, social media, and any content produced)
- Marketing management tools
- Events and related marketing collateral

Of course, some kinds of marketing activities will be easier to measure than others. A paid ad, for instance, can easily show you how much you spent against the value of the generated sales. The success of an event, on the other hand, can be harder to quantify.

Either way, when you’re evaluating your current marketing spend, make a note of:

- The cost of each marketing activity
- The influence that each activity might have had on your customers’ attitudes and behaviours
- Whether any sales were the result of particular marketing activities
- The return-on-investment from these marketing activities

The data you gather from past performances here can help to inform what you’ll spend your budget on.

Once you can identify and define your marketing goals, you’ll have a better idea of where your money needs to go.

Whatever you want to achieve, keep your goals SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. These five qualities let you stay focused on the end result, can sync up to your company’s wider goals and are easily adjusted if you aren’t happy with the progress you’re making.

You’ll need everything in place so you can sell, promote, develop and, of course, market your brand, product and services. Try keeping the following in mind when planning your budget...

Your marketing team

When it comes to personnel, there are a few different options available to you. You can rely on the skills and experience of your existing team, bring in short-term freelancers, or hire new people to join the team. Remember, freelancers usually charge an hourly rate, while hiring full-time employees will involve the likes of training and onboarding – which takes time and money. Make sure you consider both of these factors in your budget before either route.

Marketing tools

To bring your campaigns to life and carry out certain everyday processes, a suite of software makes things easier. Depending on what you want to do with your campaigns, you may need to budget for things like customer relationship management, design, automation, lead capture and generation and digital assessment management.

And since these tools will come at a cost, it’s well worth trying out free options first. Once you and your team know what they want to work with, then you can fork out for the real thing.

Digital assets

Everything from your website to your social media to the creation of content can be grouped into digital assets. And all of these things cost money. Once you’ve budgeted for them, you can then tinker with the amounts based on the returns they bring in.

Advertising

Whether it’s things like physical ads, paid ads, social media promotions, or anything similar, you’ll have to budget for these too.

This is a big one. Effective migration can be paved with all manner of different hurdles, so it’s important to know what to watch out for before your migration begins. We recommend keeping the following obstacles in mind…

DIFFERENT PLATFORMS

If you’re migrating content from one WordPress installation to another, consider yourself lucky – there are tools at your disposal to help automate the export and import of pages and posts which you plan to bring across, but you’ll still need to identify exactly what gets pushed live in the new build and subject your content to a thorough QA review.

If you’re migrating across different platforms, it’s always a good idea to discuss migration strategy with your development team to see if they can produce scripts or access off-the-shelf integrations which reduce your team’s manual efforts.

If you’re conducting the whole process manually, it’s essential to ensure you know the differences between your old CMS and the requirements of the new one so that you can plan population effectively.

ISSUES WITH SEO

We won’t lie, content migration will affect your SEO performance if you don’t properly plan things out and migrate to a high-quality standard. Traffic, engagement and page performance can all take a hit if the new version of a page isn’t deemed to be as high-calibre by search engines as the previous. We’ll look at some key SEO considerations to be aware of later in this article.