What is a marketing budget?
It's always a good idea to create a marketing strategy, which includes a marketing budget. Marketing plan templates can look different but typically include the following.
Content in a marketing plan - example:
- The products and services to be marketed
- The specific target groups the products and services should be marketed to
- The sales channels the products and services must be marketed on
- The way marketing via sales channels should be done
- A budget for the above
- A timeline for the above
As you can see, if you don't set a budget, the above will get out of hand.
So the budget helps:
- How much money should/can be set aside for marketing
- Distribute the amount over the entire time period
- Distribute the amount to different activities
It wouldn't do you any good if you spend more money on marketing than your company can afford. Or if your employees have already spent all the money set aside in the middle of the period and there is no more money left to advertise and promote your company and its products.
That's why a marketing plan super important to include in the planning of a company's marketing activities.
Marketing budget example
In your marketing budget, you need to include all the costs you can imagine incurring for your marketing activities.
For example, it can be expenses for:
- And marketing agency
- Marketing tools
- Online marketing-activities
- Offline marketing activities
For example, would you like to advertise via Google Ads adsthen your estimated costs for this should be included in your marketing budget.
However, this doesn't mean that your budget is locked in and can't change along the way. Especially for a startup trying out different advertising options, it can be very difficult to estimate a specific amount for Facebook, as the company doesn't yet know if it works.
It can also happen for a larger company where customers are changing behavior or the company is experimenting in new areas, for example by using growth hacking.
