How Much Should My Marketing Budget Be?

Determine Your Business Goals

Many factors will determine what your marketing budget should be. You’ll want to start by knowing your business goals, and you can evaluate these goals by asking yourself the following questions:

Do you want to:

• Expand your current customer base? 
• Break into new markets by increasing your goods and services? 
• Have a higher customer retention rate? 
• Determine how much of your products/services you can provide in a 30-day window? 
• See what your profits are after expenses? 

Armed with precise business goals, you can start calculating your marketing budget. Once those goals are determined, businesses can exponentially grow while following a marketing strategy recommendation from ArcMinute Marketing. Contact us today at 734-263-1890.

Calculate Your Marketing Budget

Some small businesses fall into a pitfall when they don’t calculate their marketing budget. So, instead, they may throw some money here and there towards marketing and experiment with different investments and channels until something sticks.

While this approach can be understandable, especially for a startup business, you’ll want to calculate your budget to prevent any marketing dollars from being wasted. Your total budget might depend upon factors like: 

• Current and future needs of your business
• The industry/market your business is in or targeting
• Whether your business is focusing on B2C or B2B
• Current revenue, resources, and customer demand

While there’s no set number your budget should be, small businesses (businesses earning less than five million in revenue) should designate 7% to 8% of income towards marketing. 

In a world dominated by eCommerce, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important digital marketing services for any small business. Of course, how much you should spend on marketing resources may vary depending upon the business.

Allocate Your Marketing Budget To The Right Channels

Once you’ve determined what percentage of your revenue you should set aside for marketing, it’s time to allocate it to the correct channels. While this process can be complicated and may take some trial and error, a thorough analysis of your customer’s journey can help.

Your customer’s journey is the process they undertake for shopping for and purchasing any goods or services they need. While every customer’s journey is different, each typically follows five steps:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Evaluation
• Purchase
• Post Purchase

Awareness and engagement are near the top of the sales funnel, while evaluation and purchase are near the bottom of the sales funnel.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A FREE CUSTOMER JOURNEY TEMPLATE

Whether your customer is already aware of the goods or services they need or are on the prowl for the right business that can provide them with this good or service, here are some resources/services small businesses can use: 

• Target search engines using SEO, local SEO, and paid search strategies
• Newsletters
• Social media channels 
• Marketing Analytics

Track Your Results & Adjust As Needed

Any business, small or large, should always be constantly evolving. Sometimes this means updating the goods and services they provide or revising your brand messaging and marketing strategies.

By tracking the results of your marketing efforts, you can adjust when needed. For example, you’ll want to analyze where the bulk of your leads are coming from and target those channels in particular.

Although marketing can be expensive, inexpensive marketing strategies can tremendously improve your SEO. These strategies will allow you to rank organically on search engines and target your specific audience.

Whether you’re getting the most leads and conversions from SEO, SEM, highly technical How-to-Guides, casual blogs through your website, quick videos on TikTok or Instagram, or quirky memes on Facebook, knowing your customer and adjusting your business is always a top priority.

Michigan SEO Agency | ArcMinute Marketing

Knowing how much your marketing budget should be can be difficult. However, with so many factors and uncertainties at play, an experienced digital marketing team can help.

Whether you’re a startup company, a small business struggling to attract new leads, or a successful business owner who doesn’t have the time and energy to handle your marketing needs, ArcMinute Marketing is here to help.

Our Michigan SEO agency is here to help small businesses increase their rankings organically on Google and other search engines. In addition, our team can provide your company or organization with engaging written content for your target audience.

Discover how ArcMinute Marketing can work with your marketing budget and grow your business. Schedule a discovery call or speak with a marketer today at 734.263.1890 or request an SEO audit!