Responsible for a Digital Strategy Budget? 12 Top Notch Ways to Spend Your Money

Strategically planning your digital strategy marketing budget is absolutely critical. Without a budget, you can easily spend thousands of dollars on a digital strategy that simply doesn’t make a difference. But instead of thinking about ways to spend the budget, think in terms of investing in the right avenues for your digital strategy.

Every dollar you spend on digital marketing should be working towards earning more than a dollar in benefits. Whether or not that means attracting more traffic or increasing your overall online presence, it is essential to make sure you maximize your online marketing efforts on a budget. Let’s look at 12 ways you can spend your digital strategy budget that makes the most impact.

1. Let Go of What is not Working 

This may seem obvious, but it is so much easier said than done. It may be tempting to keep doing what you’re doing, but you need to be honest with yourself. If something isn’t working, it’s time to let it go.

If you have three campaigns going on at once, and one is obviously getting lower results than the others, don’t keep pumping money into hoping it will bounce back. Just let it go and move on. 

2. Use Complementary Strategies

Get more out of your marketing budget by distributing the funds among complementary strategies. Rather than investing into two separate tactics, invest in two similar tactics and see if that improves your overall strategy. For example, content marketing and SEO are two strategies that could feasibly be invested in separately; but if you invest in both of them, each will help the other see better results.

In this case, content will give you more opportunities to build relevance for your target SEO keywords, and SEO will drive more traffic to your content so it gets more views, shares, and conversions.

3. Repurpose your Content

Don’t be afraid to repurpose your content. Recycle your material from one medium to another to save time and money in the future. Not only will this save your digital marketing budget, but you will also save creative energy by resharing your old content. 

4. Find Ways You Can Save

When looking at your digital marketing budget, think about ways that you can take on a DIY approach or shop for a more affordable option. For example, if you want to hire a well-established graphic designer, but find that you may not have room in the budget, consider opting for a less experienced designer that may not have the portfolio yet, but still produces quality work.

If you do your research, you can avoid overpaying and keep that digital marketing budget stretched for other projects. 

5. Experiment

Don’t be afraid to experiment! Try different tactics, different content, and different audiences, different post schedules to find out what works best for you.

If you never try, you never know! Switch it up every now and then to see if you might be missing out on a great opportunity to make your digital marketing succeed. 

6. Target your audience effectively

Every marketing strategy is more effective when it’s targeted specifically to the right audience. Your product or service is not right for everyone, so find who would most benefit from your product or service and cater your material for them.

You want your messages to be relevant and resonate well with your audience. Although you may not reach everyone, you will reach the right people, which will make your budget stretch a little further.

7. Use a Marketing Budget Tracker

The best way to spend your budget wisely is to use a budget tracker. Not only will this keep you on track, but it will also help with tracking your expenses, and analyzing variances. Instead of tracking down your receipts and invoices, streamline this process by having everything in one place.

With a marketing budget tracker, you can visualize your data to see how your budget and spend have been allocated by category. This report will also help you when you’re preparing subsequent budgets, as you can factor proposed spend, actual spend, and the results of your spend into your future planning. 

8. Review Your Company’s Marketing Goals

Before you decide to spend your budget, review your company’s marketing goals. Make sure you’re aligned on what is priority with the company before you spend thousands on something that is not central to the organization. If you’re planning on hiring more team members this quarter, make sure your budget reflects that goal. 

9. Review Last Year’s or Quarter’s Results

Also before you spend the marketing budget, review last year’s results. This goes back to strategy 1: cut what is not working. If you have clear, concise numbers from last year or last quarter, you can look at what is or what is not working.

This will save you from making the same mistakes. If you spent $5,000 on Facebook Ads last quarter and saw no clicks, conversations, or conversions, it may be a good idea to scale back on the Facebook Ads or rethink your Facebook strategy. 

10. Determine the Appropriate Channels

Not all promotional channels are created equal. It is essential that you choose the appropriate channels for your marketing campaign.

Do you want to target specific audiences based on demographics? Or do you want to target specific audiences based on intent and behaviors? The importance of budgeting is to put the right amount of money in the right place.

These steps will give you the insights you need to choose the best place to promote your product, and which ones to avoid wasting your money on.  

11. Paid Search

Paid search is not cheap. Expect to spend on Google Ads around $9,000-$10,000 a month on online ad campaigns. If you’re trying to get to a certain number of website clicks per month, set your budget based on your ad clickthrough rates and page submission rates to determine how much you should expect to spend.

12. Paid Social 

Similar to paid search, paid social campaigns can also be expensive. But this strategy has the highest ROI for ads. Oftentimes, companies will see the most investment come from paid social ads.

And if you’re working with an influencer campaign, you can also expect to spend a few thousand dollars as well. But the results will speak for themselves.