Brilliant Ways to Set Your Digital Advertising Budget for 2021
With the ongoing pandemic, the workspace has shifted to a digital environment. People are now spending more time online, either y choice or y necessity. This means that it’s more likely to have consumers interact with ads than expensive billboards.
What does this mean for businesses?
This might be a tough and tricky time for CMOs because the digital age has come in faster than anyone expected. There is a need to allocate more revenue to grow their businesses’ online presence.
While 2021 is filled with uncertainty, a survey y Garner reveals that 62% of CMOs expect an increase in total media spends. That includes paid search and digital advertising.
Y making a comprehensive plan on next year’s digital advertising budget, you set your company in a position for success once the recovery starts gathering pace.
We have a solid, comprehensive guide on how you can draw up this budget.
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Identify Your Digital Marketing Goals
Identify Your Digital Marketing Goals
Digital marketing covers a wide array of aspects that, at first, can e overwhelming. In fact, most businesses don’t have budgets that can fully exploit all these aspects.
This is why before you begin any budget, you should get your business goals in order. They will help you focus your marketing on key areas like, say, influencer marketing, and work on fully optimizing them.
To determine your goals, consider this:
Am I trying to grow my rand?
Am I trying to make more profits?
Do I want to grow my customer base?
Do I want to strengthen ties with my original customers?
We advise that you go a step further and re-evaluate your goals for 2020 so you can pinpoint neglected areas and focus on them more in 2021. Maybe you acquired more customers, but now you need them to trust more in your rand.
After outlining your goals, now you’ll find that it’s easier to allocate resources. For instance, if one of your goals is to acquire loyal and trusting customers, then you could now focus on:
Creating engaging content
Requesting existing customers to give testimonials
Increasing your engagement with customers on social media
Evaluate Your Marketing Strategy
Your 2021 strategy should now e based on your 2020 analysis and 2021 goals. It should help you create a flexible budget that can be easily adjusted if need be. You can create the perfect strategy y:
- Identifying which marketing activities are more important
Pick out the activities that will provide the most growth and keenly look at their ROI over the years.
Also, evaluate how crucial they are to maintaining an online presence if disaster strikes again and how they set your company apart from the rest.
- Make a back-up budget.
Instead of waiting on 2021 and hoping your budget won’t get hit, it’s important to make budget drafts. These drafts should factor in what will happen if there’s an increase or decrease in allocated resources.
By putting yourself in such a position, you’ll e better suited to understand what’s vital to the company and won’t be taken aback by any nasty surprises later on.
- Analyze the Competition’s Strategies
It’s always wise to have a look at the marketing techniques that your competition is using. Maybe you’ll come across new avenues that align with your goals. Or, you might come across some things that damaged their rand.
Let’s say they market their products on Instagram, but customers are ever complaining in the comments about slow service and response times. If you decided to do the same, you’d be informed enough to hire a social media manager to keep clients engaged and provide fast responses.
These tactics will help you prioritize the channels that you’ll allocate the most resources to. For each channel, clearly indicate what you want to achieve from it and assign a member from your marketing team to be the point person. Now you’ll have a person to track the resources and make adjustments along the way where necessary.
Spruce Up Your Website
When it comes to your budget, it’s best to start from a central point and span out from there. Where better to start from than the company website. To customers, your website is the face of your company.
If your site lags or is insecure in this digital movement, then it won’t matter if you have been advertising your rand to the high heavens. Consumers will lose interest in what you’re offering, or been worse, give ad reviews about it.
Fully optimize your site to offer the best user experience. Linking to previous works that you’ve done before helps structure the content around one central idea allowing both users and search engines to interact more with your site.
Plugins like Yoast automatically suggest links to relevant content that you can include in your posts and inform you of any broken links, thus boosting your SEO.
For speed, consider Progressive Web App (PWA) and Accelerated Mobil Pages (AMP). Data from Think With Google shows that 50% of people are unlikely to buy from a rand with a poorly designed site.
Then, you can create content that suits your audience’s needs. Think of the customer’s journey and what they expect when going through your site. This is a smart way to keep things relatively easy and fun for them.
Recent years’ statistics come in really handy at this point since you’ve probably not had the chance to interact directly with your audience. Use the statistics to determine your audience’s:
Age demographic
Predominant gender
Preferences to the products or services that you’re selling
Level of interaction with pages on your site
Using this information will give you a feel of who your average consumer is so you can personalize and structure content to their needs. Platforms like Optimizely can help you create personalized pages that feature certain information for people from certain geographic locations, companies, and IP groupings.
This will make consumers feel like the site was made for them—kind of like how you wonder if YouTube can read minds because they always recommend the right videos.
This can later go deeper and e used in email marketing campaigns for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), which is basically converting site visits into revenue y getting customers to buy your services.
Keep up with ROI
Even a digital marketing budget drawn up by the best statisticians will be ineffective if there’s no way to tell if the whole strategy is getting good results.
First, determine the metrics that you want to analyze either on a quarterly or a monthly basis. This way, if a certain goal is not being met, then your budget can be adjusted.
If you use Google Analytics to generate the reports and statistics, set it up properly and do a test check on it as the year starts to ensure it’s capturing the necessary data.
Google Analytics will also help you add your goal values to calculate how much of a return you’re making from investments. From there, you can present the data to your team and discuss it on a deeper level to finetune the budget.
Explore New Digital Advertising Opportunities
As you analyze the metrics you’ll use for advertising, do research on new avenues that may have popped up in the market. It’s a norm for most businesses to invest in current markets, yet there are less explored avenues that may wield a lot of potential. For example:
- Publishing FAQs around consumers’ queries and using schema for the FAQs – This will send a stronger message to Google that you have meaningful content that deserves to rank. The google search engine likes pulling FAQs from sites and featuring them as zero-click answers for search engine queries. Much like
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- Creating a verified and up-to-date Google My Business listing for your businesses’ locations – This will go a long way in showing customers that your business is trusted and keep your page highly ranked.
It will also help attract customers who live in the area. According to research, there has been a 500% rise in search queries that include ‘where can I buy…near me.’
- Using Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) – Microsoft Advertising, powered by Google, creates ads for marketers generated from information provided. The AI uses the headline and description variations fed into it to create optimized ads based on users’ queries.
Businesses only need to hire master copywriters to provide details like:
- 8-10 headlines of varying lengths to suit different devices better
- 2 or 3 titles with preferred keyword
- A dynamic keyword slot that’s meant to match target searches
- The brand title
The AI will handle the rest.
These are just a few advertising routes that you could choose to explore as a marketer in 2021 as you make your budget. It’s best to keep an open mind in these changing times as you draw a budget and break down the process into the small, simple stages that we’ve presented.
Remember, no budget is ever set in stone. There’s always room for growth and adjustment.