Digital Media has changed the game for the advertising industry worldwide. Long gone are the days when advertising relied solely on promotions, commercials, and billboard advertising. Keeping social media into play, advertisers are now experimenting with various digital marketing forms that plowing lesser resources and create larger impacts.
However, while digital marketing is essential, businesses must establish a strategic plan and a budget alongside it. Regardless of your business’s size, there are numerous digital marketing platforms and tools you can use, some of which can alleviate the strain on your digital marketing budget.
This article will walk you through how you can create a sufficient digital media budget, specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that need to be placed, and how businesses can gauge performance off of what they have spent.
Setting a Spend Budget for Digital Media Marketing
According to U.S Small Business Administration, businesses must allocate a minimum of 7%-8% of gross revenue to marketing, of which 50% should be spent on digital media marketing. Not to mention, the rise of the global pandemic has only led to an aggravation in the media spend budget for marketers who are facing a set of challenges to retain and attract customers.
A business may invest time and money in social media but may not be satisfied with the current Return on Investments (ROI) ‘s due to it. Here is where reassessing your budget becomes crucial.
Here are some factors you need to be mindful of when establishing a digital media spend budget:
Audience Matters
Every business must identify the audience they are catering to before creating a strategy, finding out who you want to reach out to and how will tell you where you should be allocating your digital media budget.
It’s time you question whether or not your audience uses social media or look for platforms that cater to most of your customer base. That is where your advertisements must be placed.
Choosing appropriate channels
After identifying your audience, you must establish a budget after carefully choosing appropriate channels for advertisement. You may even consider mixing some of them for the best results.
Social media advertising
Your business can leverage social media when using the right algorithms and platforms. Many prefer marketing on social media. In fact, social media advertising by businesses was predicted to reach an ad spend worth $102 billion by 2020.
With apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn catering to over 1 billion users each, there’s a high chance you will find your target audience on these social media networks.
SEM Campaigns
93% of online interactions begin with a search engine. Search engine marketing allows brands to increase visibility and top search results with paid strategies.
Hybrid
If digital marketing does not reach all of your audience, consider a hybrid marketing method. This method calls for combining digital and traditional marketing channels to produce effective results.
Video campaigns
Video advertising on Google, YouTube, and other credible websites helps you get noticed and appeal to the audience using visuals and creatives, which can help meet business objectives.
Display advertising
Display ads are placed in texts, images, and banners on numerous third-party websites to gain recognition from an audience already built on a particular site.
Programmatic Digital Marketing
Programmatic advertising streamlines the process of digital advertisement through one technological platform. It is a modern automated process that purchases ad inventory on your behalf for effective, hyper-targeted ads catering to specific users.
Software and tools
Adobe, Ignition One, and other software/tools, provide marketers with versatile tools and algorithms that improve bidding strategies. These tools can assist with content creation, optimization and can enhance reporting capabilities.
Establishing KPIs to Manage Performance
KPI’s allow you to gauge your business’s performance. In terms of digital marketing, KPI’s can keep track of your performance and can help you amend your strategy accordingly. Your KPI’s include valuable data of your website traffic, total revenue, ROI, conversion rates, and other figures that stem from digital marketing strategies. Brand awareness, sales growth, SEO campaigns all lead to metrics of Digital Marketing KPI’s.
KPI’s can stem from PPC tools like Google Ads, analytic and lead conversion tools, or even social media KPIs like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more.
The Importance of KPI’s in a Media Spend Budget
Keeping track of KPIs will not only give you a clear picture of how things are working out (and things that aren’t) but will inform you of areas that have room for more investment due to greater returns and strategies that are less profitable.
Evaluating KPI’s and your response rate will help you to gauge business performance while contributing to decisions that will impact your revised digital media strategy AND budget.
However, you need to be sure to track the right KPI’s while you are at it. Following the ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) criteria can be a great way to grasp performance measures. Businesses should establish their new budget as per their KPI’s for a more efficient allocation of resources to produce effective results.
Here is a guide for What Should You Spend on Marketing in 2021?
Digital marketing is the future for many industries, but you may not maximize your profit potential without effective strategies and performance measures.
