Are you searching for the perfect digital marketing mix? Maybe you’ve got a budget but aren’t sure how to best allocate your funds for the most impact. Let’s look at a few practices we’d recommend for those firms that are just starting to invest in a concerted effort in marketing – 30-60K per year – to get a feel for what that might look like.
Fight the Urge: Don’t hire a Marketing Manager
The first tip with a marketing budget this size is to not hire a marketing manager. When your budget reaches this size you want to make sure you are spending it well, and the fact is that you don’t have enough to really put someone on a salary on this task. Your best bet is to hire an inbound marketing agency to help you generate, plan and build your marketing mix.
70% on Inbound Marketing Efforts
The largest part of your marketing mix should be spent on activities that will drive traffic and customers to your business. If you have a 50K a year budget, 35K of that should be spend on inbound marketing activities. This includes things like Website development, SEO, email campaigns, social media management, video, and lead scoring – all the activities that are going to drive traffic to your website and into your inbox. Read more about inbound marketing here, and more about services here.
15% on Paid Advertising
We love inbound, but as a company, buying traffic or leads can be a beneficial addition, especially in areas you want to grow. If you are a painting company and you’ve just started offering a new service to commercial offices, you might use paid ads to drive leads for that product area. Your inbound will take a few months to get established and you may need leads now.
8% on Outbound Activities
You should spend some money on the activities that involve you getting out in your community. As a company of this size, you’re likely still engaged in a local marketing place. You’ll need to get your face out in the community. Use this money for sponsorships, swag, events, and to get your prospects into a room. Give it as a bonus to any employee who can drive leads to the company.
5% on Targeted Engagement
Five percent of 50K is a measly $2,500, so what’s the big deal? Well, that is a lot of money if you are thinking about engaging 10-15 clients specifically with high impact marketing. Maybe it’s a referral campaign or a nurture campaign that can help to build your referral sales. What if you put that aside to take each client to dinner and speak to them about networking? Or to send them gifts in really meaningful ways? Sometimes we like to support a charity on our client’s behalf as another way of engaging them in our vision. The point is to make it very focused on each individual with the goal of deepening the relationship.
~2% on Something Brand New
You should always keep a little back in your budget to try something new each year. Maybe this year it’s video for you. Maybe it could be a photo shoot to update your images on the website. Maybe it could be a specific campaign on a channel you’ve never done before. The point is, plan to do something new to test and evaluate what can work for your company in new ways.
Tip: Make the Most of your Marketing Mix
The best tip to making the most of your marketing mix is to dive into each budget in methodical ways to optimize the campaigns and spending on each budget. Instead of dropping 15K into one Adwords campaign, target 4-5 specific, smaller campaigns with 50% of your budget, and then hit the remainder once you’ve found the sweet spot. Jim Collins calls this “fire bullets, then cannon balls”. This will give you a growth and learning focus, and keep you and your team engaged in consistently thinking of new ways to get more out of each dollar spent. Good marketing is a culture of doing more with less. I hope this helps you get started on making the most of your marketing mix!
