How to strategically manage your marketing spend with 8 integrated simple marketing budget templates
Setting strategic and channel direction, working toward commercial objectives and KPIs, and monitoring your success is great. But if you're not tracking your ROI per channel it's hard to understand how much money you've had to spend to see a return. That's why you need a practical, accessible marketing budget.
How much budget is allocated to marketing?
Did you know, as of Fall 2023, marketing accounts for 10.6% of overall budgets, and 9.2% of company revenues? In small businesses, with fewer than 50 employees, this rises to 18.1% of the budget, but 19.5% of the revenue. Whereas those with over 10,000 employees allocate just 8.1% to marketing, to achieve 4.8% of revenue.
The latest CMO survey found that yearly growth in marketing spending is predicted to rise 7.2% in 2024. Within this growing budget, digital marketing spending…
How to select the best digital and traditional marketing channels from 30+ alternatives
Small businesses have particularly limited resources whether it is people or budget, so it's crucial to select the most cost-effective communications to invest in. That means, free and low-cost marketing channels. In this guide, we will help you identify the best channels to use using two simple frameworks, so that you're not starting with a blank piece of paper or screen and can work through the options.
We'll review both online and offline techniques starting with 30+ channels to consider and then at the end, as a summary we'll help you zoom in on the top 5 to make it more manageable.
Using the Marketing Bullseye to select marketing channels
The Bullseye was recommended by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maiers in their book Traction, a nice hook to show the challenges of gaining visibility online to drive customer acquisition. Justin…
Examples of how SMEs can use Porter’s 5 Forces to assess marketplace viability
Right now, Porter's 5 Forces is the most useful tool for owners and managers to stay one step ahead of the competition in a challenging market. The Porter's 5 Forces model has always been popular with SMEs in particular, looking to invest for growth and manage risk to their limited resources.
Earmarked as the best marketing model to help small businesses analyze the competition in the marketplace, balancing these 5 forces is a must for your 2022 marketing action plan.
What are Porter’s 5 Forces?
Porter’s 5 Forces is an analytical model that helps marketers and business managers look at the ‘balance of power’ in a market between different organizations on a global level, and to analyze the attractiveness and potential profitability of an industry sector.
Competitive rivalry
Threat of substitute products
Bargaining power of buyers
Threat…
Startup company growth needs effective and easily accessible digital tools and resources
Over the past few years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of startups that can be seen as a fresh alternative to working in corporations. This is due to their creators’ desire to be independent and run their own company, but also due to changes taking place in the business culture, rapid technological development and most of all, easy access to tools that help grow and manage firms effectively.
As a matter of fact, every startup company supporting relevant software and digital sources can build a strong marketing campaign and grow business all by itself. Looking for tools to conduct startup business, entrepreneurs are drawing attention to some of their common features:
• Easy availability
• Low-cost or free
• Accelerating work
• Integrated with other tools
SaaS…
SMEs needn't be left behind by new Marketing Automation technology
A dismal 37 percent of shoppers say that the average retailer “gets” them. It’s perhaps for this reason that consumers spend a lot of time researching online before making a purchasing decision offline. And for the first time ever, - as data shows - there are more online sales than in brick and mortar stores in some sectors.
The difference is that the new kids on the block - the ecommerce guys - are making use of technology to improve the customer journey, which is one of the most critical factors to keeping customers and attracting more business.
In fact, C-suite executives reckon four particular technologies will be key for marketing success in the future:
Cloud computing and services
Mobile solutions
The Internet of Things
Cognitive tools
This article examines the top marketing trends for 2017 that are specifically related to these four technologies,…
Chart of the Day: New research reveals that the vast majority of small businesses have only a basic understanding of SEO
A recent survey by Higher Visibility asked over four hundred and twenty small business owners about how well their internal teams understand SEO, and the results paint a rather dire picture for the state of SEO in small enterprises.
180 business owners (over one-third) either didn't know or reported that their team had no understanding of SEO. While over half of respondents said their team only possessed a basic understanding of SEO. In today's competitive SEO landscape, a basic grasp really isn't going to get you very far. If you want to effectively harness the power of organic search then you need to be using the latest techniques and not making any SEO mistakes, which those without a deep knowledge of the subject are likely to make.
…
