Do You Have A Marketing Budget Plan?
Any business owner knows the value of having a marketing budget plan, and its effectiveness when it comes to promoting one’s business. Do you have one? Are you prepared to make strides for 2018-2019?
Take a look at these tips suggested by this contributed article and see how you can implement one or all in your business health planning.
Three Places Your Marketing Budget Plan Should Be Going in 2018- 2019
Marketing is so important when it comes to business, but it’s something that many naive first time entrepreneurs can overlook completely.
With so much competition these days with so many other businesses out there, marketing allows you to reach the right customers – it’s not just a case of opening your doors (physical or digital) and waiting for the customers to come flooding in.
You need to use the right marketing methods so that people can discover you, find out you exist, and have a reason to choose you over your more established competitors. Here are some of the places you should be putting your marketing budget.
Modern Market Research
Before spending a penny on stock, products, a website or anything else, you need to invest in good market research. In your mind, your future company might be the best thing since sliced bread but you need to know that people are going to want what you’ll be selling.
Are you filling a gap in the market, or appealing to the right customers? Are the items you’re planning on selling going to be at the right price point, and overall, is your business likely to succeed? You won’t know any of this without market research, don’t try and scrimp and save costs here.
Modern market research methods are fantastic, companies like Explorer Research for example allow you to simulate entire shop environments allowing you to test different planograms and packaging, layout and much more. You can see this all from 360 degree angles and is the closest thing to an actual shop environment.
Any flaws or issues will be spotted here allowing you to make changes instead of waiting for them to materialize in person when lots of money has been spent. Your market research could show that your business isn’t appealing to enough people and you need to rethink the entire idea.
In many cases, it will just show you a few potential snags that you’ll need to tweak before launching. Skip this step and you might have to make changes as you go which could cost you time and money.
Blogger Outreach
Bloggers can be incredibly influential, and as business owners we need to be open to utilizing what they can do for us and collaborating with them as part of our marketing strategy. The difficulty here is building up a repertoire of reliable bloggers, and knowing how much they should be paid depending on how influential their sites are.
Unless you’re knowledgeable and experienced in this area, it can be worth working with a company who specializes in this. They will already have bloggers on their books and have a good relationship with them making everything run much more smoothly.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is another thing that’s extremely important for businesses to be on board with. Not only can potential customers see reviews written by real people and find out how responsive you are to queries, questions and complaints but it’s a great way to deliver marketing materials.
Work on building up your follower base, you can do this by running things like competitions and sweepstakes where people need to follow you to enter. The more people you have following you, the more that will see the promotional materials you put out.
Here’s hoping that you found this marketing budget plan awareness a great tool to get your business heading in the right direction towards your success. All the best.
Images courtesy of Pixabay and Pexels.
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2 thoughts to “Do You Have A Marketing Budget Plan?”
I definitely have thought about this many times. I know a skilled marketing person or team would do a much better job marketing than I do. For now our marketing budget is spent on our own ads and effort. Growing to the point where we can pay a marketer will also take time.
Hello Tara,
Thanks for stopping by. Yes, as we get our businesses off the ground, we tend to have a ‘specialized’ (read basic or limited) budget with which to work. Until then, we have to be creative indeed. However, in time, we should make it to that place where we can invest more into the business to take the growth to the next level. All the best.
Michelle