Running a small or medium-sized business feels like flying by the seat of your pants—everything’s new, fast-paced, and essential. You’re setting up processes left and right, hiring new people, and solidifying your corporate identity. These are growing pains but worth the sacrifice as you establish a budding company.
However, these don’t mean you should ignore your marketing budget.
Marketing is as crucial as the rest of your other priorities. It puts your company out there, branding services and products your customers will need now or in the future.
To get that aspect in order, here’s a neat guide on setting up a marketing budget and measuring your return on investment (ROI)!
Inclusions
A marketing budget needs these roles in its package:
- Content creation services
- Digital marketing services
- Branding services
- Graphic design
- Website development
- Account management
These services must be available across various media, such as radio, TV, print, mail, etc.
The Budget
The amount of money spent on marketing varies according to the business’s size. Per Forbes, these are how marketing budgets should be budgeted:
- Small to Medium Companies: 5 to 7 percent of your total revenue
- Large to Multinational Companies: 8 percent and above of your total revenue
Take note that these figures are only rules of thumb. If you want to gain more visibility or market share, you can increase spending in this aspect.
Some budget tips to bear in mind include:
- Branding Presence: Do you have a professional website, social media profiles, and other online portfolios that solidify you as a legitimate company?
- Branding Aesthetics: Do these media have the same corporate look or need a rehash?
- Online Visibility: Where are you marketing online? Do you notice any pros and cons across your marketing campaigns? Are any of these online portfolios gaining more traction than the rest, and do you need content creation or digital marketing services to improve leads and conversions?
You can visit Small Business Administration (sba.gov) for more info on other marketing budget factors you need to consider.
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ROI Calculation
Return on investment or ROI is a figure calculated from your gross income minus expenses. This simple formula determines how much profit you’ve gained from spending minus earning.
The actual figure computation is:
Gross income – marketing expenses = net income or profit
To get the percentage, the formula is:
Net income / marketing expenses x 100 = growth percentage
The beauty of these computations is you can apply them to each campaign to determine which medium is most effective and which medium you need to cut loose.
In the case of content creation services and digital marketing services, if:
Marketing expenses = $15,000
Gross income = $1,000,000
Net income or profit = $985,000
Then dividing the expenses from the net income yields a 6,567 percent ROI! This is an excellent rate!
If you have traditional media marketing services that aren’t working, the computations could look like:
Marketing expenses = $15,000
Gross income = $20,000
Net income or profit = $5,000
These numbers only produce a 33 percent ROI rate. While still positive, this is 199 times less than the gains from your online efforts. Therefore, you can make an informed decision to either retain, lessen, or remove traditional marketing services and focus solely on online efforts since they yield a more significant ROI and ROI percentage.
In Closing
Always commit your business plans to paper and documentation. That way, you’re in the know regarding what’s happening to your company, marketing expenses included. As they say, you need to spend money to make money, and a marketing budget will help you figure out where to put all your efforts to generate the most income and achieve a higher ROI percentage!
Are you a startup, local business, or non-profit with a new vision to show? Get in touch with Luxury Sandbox now! We are dedicated to work with our clients to help them succeed every step of the way with our passion for content creation and digital marketing services!
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