How to Plan Your Marketing Budget for 2018 | EP 106

How to Plan Your Marketing Budget for 2018

1. Understand Your Revenue 01:42
   • It’s really important to have a good understanding of your business and how you’ve done in the past.
   • You want to know how much money you’re bringing in and how much you average a month. That’s all going to depend on your pipeline and your close-ratio.
   • You know your business better than anyone else, so you know what that pipeline needs to look like. You know what your close ratio is going to be and your average amount per customer spent. If you’re focusing on brochure websites, landing pages, or other lower income-producing websites, then you know how many you’re going to have to come up with to hit your goals for the year.
2. Make Conservative Projections/Forecasting 02:58
   • Once you do step one and understand your revenue, you can begin to make some projections for the marketing budget.
   • You are basically estimating what your revenue will be based off of the historical data. If you had a consistent growth rate of 20% month over month, then you might estimate that you will continue that into the new year.
   • Also, factor in that you will get more referrals as your business grows. This means less time spent on cold calls and outreach.
3. Determine if You’re the Best Person for the Job 04:28
   • You need to find out whether or not you’re the person to handle and do the marketing for your company. If you’re not a really good sales person and you struggle with that, you may need to consider hiring someone to help you with that part of the business, or even consider having a business partner.
4. Set Budget 05:36
   • Once you finish the precursor steps, you can start to set your actual marketing budget.
   • Start low and plan to scale. It is so easy to spend a lot of money with Google or Facebook ads, so start small with these kind of budgets and increase as these ads start to perform.
5. Execute, Analyze, Repeat 07:22
   • Revisit your marketing budget throughout the year to see how you are doing and what you should adjust.