4 Rules to Follow When Setting Your Marketing Budget

Your marketing budget is one thing that needs to be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that it is performing optimally. If you fail to do this, you could find yourself spending money that is not giving you an adequate long-term return (also known as ROI). To grow your business successfully, prioritizing financial concerns, such as your marketing budget, is key. Here are four rules you will want to follow as it relates to your marketing budget:

1. Avoid Making Decisions Based on Potential Future Outcomes.

While there is nothing wrong with making potential forecasts for your business, you should never let it is impact your current decisions. this is particularly true when finances are involved. Instead, you need to rely on any past and present data that you have available when developing your marketing budget. This ensures that your decision is based on logic and increases your future success.

2. Make Proven Marketing Methods a Priority.

When working on your marketing budget, you need to make sure that the majority of your budget is allocated toward methods that have provided you previously with proven results. So, if your previous quarter has given your great success with advertisements on Facebook. You may want to consider allocating a little bit more of your money into that particular method this next quarter and continue monitor those results.

3. Use a Portion of Your Budget for New Methods.

While the majority of your budget should be focused on proven tactics, you should also use a smaller portion -- about 10 percent -- on testing new methods of marketing. So, let's say that one of your competitors have had success with direct mail marketing. While you don't want to jump the gun and assume you'll experience the same exact success, it doesn't hurt to give it a try and see how effective it is for your company.

4. Embrace Your Marketing Mistakes and Learn from Them.

There's a lesson to learn in every mistake and failure, even in marketing. So, you poured a ton of money into that one particular marketing campaign last quarter and it failed miserably. You didn't make any money, or you made very little. Well, it's okay. Lesson learned. You know not to do it again, or at least not for a while. Simply learn from your mistakes and move on.

As you set your marketing budget, keep the aforementioned four rules in mind. You simply need to determine what is best for your business so that you can spend your marketing dollars wisely and realize impressive returns. If you need assistance, feel free to reach out to us here at WebDetail for marketing guidance.