Digital marketing provides many channels of opportunity to grow your business. Between PPC, email marketing, and SEO, it can be hard to determine how to allocate your budget for the highest ROI. The digital marketing needs of your business may vary over time, resulting in the reallocation of your digital marketing budget. To determine how to best invest your dollars, we have provided a guide to help you understand each avenue available to you.
How to Invest In Digital Marketing
Whether your digital marketing efforts are in-house or outsourced to an agency or freelancer, you will need to determine a budget that best suits the needs and expectations of your business. There are several areas of digital marketing that you may want to invest in including:
- Content: Usually written through an experienced copywriter or industry expert either in-house or outsourced, new content can be used across marketing channels or on your site
- Image & Video Assets: Invest in new assets that represent your brand to use across marketing channels and on your site
- SEO: Increase organic traffic to your site through the implementation of SEO strategies such as link building and content optimization
- Email Marketing: Nurture leads to promote your business and products/services through automation, newsletters, and product emails
- PPC: Also known as Pay-per-Click, this covers marketing involving paid ad campaigns through search engines, social media, or other platforms
- Social Media: helps increase brand awareness and brand engagement; creates an easy avenue to provide your target audience with updates on your business and products/services
The many options available to your business through digital marketing can feel overwhelming. When determining which areas to invest in, you first need to assess the needs of your business.
High-quality written content is invaluable to your site and business as a whole. It is what users read to learn about your business. It reflects the voice of your brand and entices potential customers to engage with your business further. Written content can be used across all marketing channels from SEO to PPC. The better your content is at persuading your target audience to engage with your brand, the more likely you are to see conversions. Content should address the needs of your target audience, present a solution to their needs through your business, and encourage them to engage with you further.
Image & Video Assets
The growth of social media is proof that image and video assets are essential to attracting most target audiences. These assets often show your products or services to your target audience, while the written content helps describe it to them. High-quality image and video assets present a level of professionalism to your target audience, showing that you are serious about what you have to offer. If you lack any images or videos of your products, or your images are grainy or stock images, you could lose out on a significant amount of business.
SEO, or , encompasses all marketing strategies that promote the growth of organic traffic to your site through search engines. Because it takes time for search engines to recognize changes on your site and determine how to place your site within search results, SEO is a long-term investment. If you are planning to invest in SEO, you should stick with your SEO efforts for 6-12 months to really see improvements in organic growth. The best part of SEO is the ability to drive qualified, free leads to your site over time.
Building out email marketing campaigns allows you to nurture your target audience after an initial engagement with your brand. When your target audience subscribes to your newsletters, you have the opportunity to keep them updated on changes to your business, products, and services. You can also promote your products/services, offer discounts, and notify previous or potential customers on something you offer that may be of interest to them.
There are two types of email marketing strategies you can implement: automation and single campaigns. Automated series are a series of actions or sent emails that are triggered when your target audience engages with your brand through a specific action. This allows you to tailor your marketing to their specific needs. Single campaigns, such as newsletters, are sent out to audience lists to provide them with updates or product/service offerings. Email marketing is recommended for businesses that experience constant changes to their offerings, business updates, or changes in product inventory. E-commerce businesses, for example, can use email marketing to offer discounts and promote their products to increase conversions.
PPC, or , is a great investment for businesses that want to see fast conversions. This allows you to set up paid advertising across platforms like Google, Bing, or even social media. These paid campaigns are sent to a targeted audience engaging with the platform that you set the campaign up on. To ensure that you have the best ROI, you will want to invest in a campaign manager with strong experience in PPC campaigns for your industry. Without the expertise of an experienced campaign manager, you could risk spending more money on paid advertising without seeing a high ROI.
Social media is not going anywhere, but it does evolve over time. Each social media platform has different types of audiences as their user base. Your social media investment will be dependent on what you want to achieve from a platform. If you are interested in paid ads on social media, you will want to work with a PPC campaign manager. If you are interested in upgrading your social media presence, you may want to invest in a social media manager or invest in new images/videos to share on your social media profiles.
Determining the Needs of Your Business
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive more traffic to your site? Increase sales? The priorities of your business can help you determine which areas of digital marketing to invest in. For example, if brand awareness is your priority, you may want to prioritize social media. If you’re more interested in lead generation, then email marketing may be the path for you. Your business’ needs may change over time. As they do, you can adjust your strategies, as well as your budget, to suit your new goals. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is feeling locked into the initial goals you set. Remember that your business needs are fluid, so your goals should be as well.
How to Calculate a Marketing Budget
After you’ve decided what the needs of your business are, comes the most difficult part: calculating how much of your marketing budget should be spent on each area of digital marketing. This is where many business owners get hung up, unsure of how exactly their budget should be allocated,and many even give up on digital marketing altogether at this point. However, this stage does not have to be difficult at all. The easiest way to calculate your marketing budget is by utilizing a . When using the calculator, you just have to answer a series of simple questions pertaining to your business. This helpful tool will guide you in the right direction when determining how to allocate your digital marketing budget. This tool can be invaluable, and usually saves a ton of time.
When to Expect Growth from Digital Marketing
There is no guarantee regarding when you will see results from your digital marketing campaign. There are so many variables when it comes to the success of a campaign, that it is impossible to predict when growth will be seen. However, on average, you can expect to start seeing results within 4-12 months when using a well-planned marketing strategy. It is important to let the campaign have ample time to create growth.
Too many times campaigns are thrown away too early when they don’t provide instant results. When you give up on a marketing strategy too early, you are not giving it enough time to show you the growth that you expect. By giving up on the strategy, you are backtracking on the progress you have made. Have faith in your campaign and budget, and you will eventually see what works and what needs tweaking.
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