How Should I Spend My Marketing Budget?
If you have a business, you may be putting together a marketing plan to help grow your sales. However, it’s difficult to know where you should assign your budget to get the very best results. This article will explore some of the main marketing channels you can utilise and how they can impact your business.
Social Media
Social media is a free marketing channel if you manage it yourself; however, it can be quite time consuming and therefore a lot of people outsource this channel to agencies.
Social media encompasses many different websites where people go to connect with friends. Whilst many businesses do very well with large social followings, what you can sometimes find is that the traffic on these platforms is not always in a consumer mindset. If they are on site on their lunch break at work, messaging their friends, a post offering a product or service can easily be scrolled past.
In order to get the best from organic social media, it really needs to be paired with pay-per-click services (more on this later) and so you should never justify the majority of your marketing budget to organic social media.
Search Engine Optimisation
If you are not down with computer jargon, you may be wondering what is SEO? As explained by ALT Agency, SEO is one of the most powerful marketing channels. This is primarily because whilst you have to pay for the work upfront, over the long-term, organic search traffic is free of charge.
It is also considered the highest converting traffic source. People who land on your website via a search engine have searched a term connected to your product or service to be there, so you know they are interested in what you have to offer.
The downsides to SEO are that it can take a significant amount of time and work to rank for competitive keywords, and maintaining rankings is not guaranteed so you do have to work on SEO on an ongoing basis to maintain positions.
SEO is a fantastic long term marketing strategy, and a significant portion of your marketing budget should be placed here for long term growth.
Pay Per Click
Pay per click is a method of marketing which allows instant eyes on your website, but eyes you are paying for on a per click basis. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo offer this service (effectively allowing you to jump to sponsored positions above organic results) and social media websites such as Facebook and Instagram also offer this as an option.
Facebook, for example, has an extremely flexible ads service, largely due to its pixel which tracks where users are going on the internet. The power of this is that you can target people who have landed on certain pages of your website with ads via the platform, creating marketing that speaks to them.
Another powerful thing about Facebook and Google is the ability to retarget traffic. You can target people again who have engaged with your website, ads, or social media posts, and the more people see your brand, the more likely they are to connect with it.
Paid ads are great in that they are instant and therefore they are a fantastic short term marketing strategy; however, they can be costly. So, whilst you should dedicate a portion of your marketing budget to ads, be sure to leave some for SEO.
To have a holistic marketing strategy, you should cater for both short term sales and long-term growth, so rather than choose one channel, spread your marketing budget between SEO and PPC for the best results.
