Brighter Marketing

I was just having a read through Drew McLellan’s marketing blog, when I spotted this article on whether or not you should have a marketing budget. It was quite a short article but it made me think about all the clients we have worked with that have asked us “should we have a marketing budget?” and I have to agree with Drew, the answer is yes. Whether you a one person consultancy or a large organisation, it is important to make sure that you budget funds for marketing. If you don’t,  then how do you know how much you have spent, what results you got and if your money was well used.

Even with the smallest of companies, we get our clients to lay our their marketing budget on a one page Excel spreadsheet, it says what they are going to do each month, how much it will cost and totals the monthly, quarterly and yearly spend. In this way you can see how much you have budgeted for which activities. Which means that when that extremely smooth talking advertising executive gives you a call with a “never to be repeated special offer”, you can take a look at your budget and say; “thanks but no thanks”.

The other question that we get asked is “how much of a marketing budget do I need?”. This is sometimes a difficult question, as if your company is in start-up mode or if you are promoting a new product you may need to make provision for more funds than you would do in a normal year. As a rough guide you should set aside 4%-7% of your total turnover to marketing, this may of course increase depending on where you are in terms of company growth, but is a good starting point.

So make sure that you put aside an amount for your marketing budget and keep to it. It’s easy to get carried away with all sorts of marketing activities if you don’t.