• Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • email
Sensei MarketingSensei MarketingSensei MarketingSensei Marketing
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
Digital Marketing Budgeting TIps

How I’d Spend a 100K Marketing Budget

By Robert Clarke | Conversion Optimisation, Conversion Rate Optimization, Digital Marketing Budgets, GOOGLE ADWORDS, influence marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Paid Search, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, Start-ups, Website Optimization | Comments are Closed | 23 July, 2014 | 0

“How should I spend my marketing budget?”

It’s the million dollar question I get a lot.

I’m going to make it a $100K question instead (not realistic for everyone, I know, but more realistic than $1m).

The strategy is to strike a balance between ATTRACTING people to your website, CONVERTING visitors into followers, prospects, or customers, and KEEPING both prospects and customers engaged with your brand.

Now obviously any marketing budget should be aligned with the goals of the business, so take the following with a grain of salt (also note: this is just for online or digital marketing).

$35K on Paid Search

Yup, I’m putting over a third of my marketing budget into paid search (includes Google AdWords, Bing/Yahoo ads, and retargeting tactics).

Why? Companies make $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google AdWords (Google Impact Report).  As a Google Partner with a lot of experience managing PPC budgets, I can say that this is more or less true.

Paid search is not plain old advertising.  It’s about connecting with prospects who are actively searching for products or services that your business sells and ensuring they find you (and not your competitor).

Paid search will help generate the leads and new customers that will allow me to grow my revenues, customer base, and thus marketing budget for next year.

$40K on “SESOCO” (SEO, Social, Content)

SESOCO: I made this term up.  The reason they should all go together is that you really need SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing working together for any of them to be truly effective.

SEO

As I’ve written about, SEO now takes a team effort. But you still need to conduct traditional SEO practices that include on-page optimization, ensuring your site is error-free, loads fast, is mobile-friendly, and is easily crawled by search engines.  As well, optimizing for local search, citation building, and of course building links (which Social Media and Content Marketing can help with too).

Social Media

There’s a few ways I’m going to use Social Media:

  • Implement a company-wide social media culture and ensure all employees are using it to listen, engage, and to deliver better customer service.
  • Distribute blogs, content, videos, white papers and other content to my target audience (building natural links in the process, which the SEO team will appreciate).
  • Use Blogger Outreach tools to find and engage with my influencers and create an Influence Marketing program.
  • Identify and target prospects that could benefit from my product or service, engage them and build long-term relationships.
  • Ensure to promote others, and be an active participant in industry conversations and helping others where I can.

Content

Using Social Media to listen to what my prospects and influencers are talking about, and creating a content that benefits them:

  • Blogs
  • White Paper
  • eBook
  • Webinar
  • How-to videos

This will help get more inbound links (SEO), more traffic, and most importantly help our customers and reflect positively on our brand.

$10K on Testing and Website Optimization

For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them (REDEYE).  There’s no point spending so much money attracting people to your website if it’s not built to “convert”.  I’m going to set up primary (email subscription, demo request, ecommerce purchase) and secondary (share post, follow blog, Facebook Like) conversion goals on my website and test, test, test.

I’m going to use testing tools that will help me try different offers, prices, headlines, images, copywriting, and anything else I can think of to continually improve the conversion rate of my website and digital properties over the long-term.

$10K on Email

Yes, it’s no longer a sexy marketing channel, but it still works (and is still very affordable).  I’ll use email to:

  • Create drip campaigns for those who’ve enquired about our business but are not yet ready to purchases
  • Create triggered or automatic emails for abandoned quotes or shopping carts
  • Let customers and prospects know about our latest promo, sale, product release, webinar, or contest
  • Syndicate blogs and other content
  • Survey customers and garner feedback and ideas

$5K Marketing R&D & Innovation

I’d earmark 5% of my budget to “new ideas”.  This could be for testing new tools and technologies, looking into data and analytics for insight on better ways to market to customers, or simply to let employees spend a little time on their own projects that they think could help the business move forward.

If my math is right, that’s a total of $100K, how would you spend it?
digital marketing budget tips, google partner, how to spend your digital marketing budget, influencer marketing, online marketing budget tips, paid search, seo, tips for marketing budget

Robert Clarke

Robert is Chief Marketing Officer at Sensei Marketing, a Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency located in Toronto, Ontario.

More posts by Robert Clarke

Related Post

  • ways to improve business sales

    3 Ways to Improve Business Sales for 2012

    By Robert Clarke | Comments are Closed

    Times are tough, and so is the competition. If you’re looking for ways to improve business sales for 2012, Op Ed Marketing recommends 3: 1. Email and Social Media Marketing No matter how big orRead more

  • public relations versus influence marketing

    Public Relations vs Influence Marketing

    By Sam Fiorella | 1 comment

    Is there a future for public relations in the era of social media? Will influence marketing kill traditional PR? And what’s the actual difference between the two? To begin with, it might be really trickyRead more

  • influence marketing insurance industry

    3 Examples of Influencer Marketing in the Insurance Industry

    By Sam Fiorella | Comments are Closed

    One of the main challenges that insurance companies face is a need to differentiate themselves. This industry overall, is just waking up to social media and influencer marketing, but some campaigns already stand out tremendously.Read more

  • identify mico influencers

    The 3 W’s and the H: Simple Steps to Identify Your Micro Influencers

    By Charmaine Deogracias | 1 comment

    “Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with A-B-C, when you sing you begin with DO-RE-MI.” So goes the song in the classic musical, “TheRead more

  • 70 influence marketing tools, tips, resources

    70+ Influencer Marketing Tips, Tools & Resources

    By Sam Fiorella | Comments are Closed

    Influence marketing is constantly evolving. It’s no longer defined solely by number of followers, outdated vanity metrics and measures (see the fate of Klout), but now focuses on identifying the right influencers who have aRead more

Home
BONDAI Platform
BONDAI Services
BONDAI Partner Program
Gift My Client Corporate Gifting
About
Contact
100 University Avenue
Suite 500
Toronto ON
Canada
M5J 1V6
Phone: 1.416.484.1400
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
Sensei Marketing