As we are nearing the end of the year, every organization is wrapping up its financial allocations. One of the most important things to consider while allocating a budget is marketing. Consumers are making more purchases online, and marketing teams are no longer limited to core marketing activities such as lead generation, advertising, branding, PR, social media, and content marketing. They are also looking after revenue generation. Therefore, you need to be very careful while allocating the marketing budget.
It can be a difficult task to decide what percentage of the earning from the previous fiscal year you should allocate into the marketing budget and into which marketing components. Thus, to help you ease your marketing allocation, we have broken down the bits of the planning process. We’ve also mapped manageable things to take into account for creating a strategic allocation model.
Keep an Estimate of Your Yearly Budget Allocation
It can be a task to create a whole new budget from scratch. Therefore, marketers need to estimate the budget for the following year by considering how much they should spend next year. After which, they should compare the performance and goals set for various segments in the current year.
Calculate the Human Resource Cost
The amount of headcount costs is generally one of the most constant budgets. It would be best if you started your marketing budget allocation with the human resource cost. The other costs may include employee compensation, training costs, special benefits, and travel expenses.
Find Out the Cost of the Marketing Program
One of the most critical areas to focus on while allocating marketing budgets is on the costs of marketing programs. It includes the development and execution of programs and campaigns. Marketers need to take a proportional allocation between the cost of marketing programs and the headcount parts of the marketing budget to check where they are spending more and how much they need to allocate their budget.
Evaluate Campaign Expenditures
The campaign represents a combination of four types of programs.
While evaluating campaign expenditure, take into account all the expenses that cover asset development in campaigns, field, global campaign execution, including demand or lead generation, sales enablement, reputation building, and market intelligence.
Evaluate Out-of-Campaign Expenditures
Out-of-campaign expenditures such as shared services, one-off tactics, corporate marketing, and marketing operations should not be missed while allocating marketing budget.
Manage Campaign Funding
You need to allocate the funding for all the identified campaigns. Divide it based on the type of horizontal activities or the targeted industry the campaigns focus on. Next, focus on how to divide funding into programs. You can prioritize campaigns based on the type of programs and divide the funding accordingly.
Customized Budget
Creating a customized budget plan will help you identify and support the specific goals of all marketing constituents. It would be best if you also showed how it could be achieved with planned marketing actions. This will ensure the budget for all components that require spending on sales training, product training, list building, and other allocated tasks.
Following these methods will assist you and your business to allocate marketing budgets by ensuring that the funding is utilized as per specific business priorities.
