Marketing Plan Budget

Question: How do I create a budget for my marketing plan?

Answer:

• You start with your marketing message – what do you want to say to your target audience?
• What channels of communication will you use to reach this audience?
• Create a budget. There are: (a) One-time costs, such as a booth at a trade show, website design or generating the creative for a brochure. (b) Periodic expenses, such as website maintenance, monthly ads, annual catalog listings, (c) The time spent on marketing activities and what it will cost and other promotional activities.

Part of the planning is to create a metrics for each marketing activity to determine its effectiveness. If you have an ad running in the Cape Cod Times on Thursdays, how many leads are generated from the ad? How many phone calls are received as a result of the ads? How many closed sales were generated from leads from the ads in the newspaper? You can generate your metrics to determine that tactics effectiveness.

Remember: your plan begins with your business (marketing) objectives, the strategies to achieve the objectives (what will you do) and the tactics (the how) to achieve the strategies. If your objective is to increase sales by 10% in the next fiscal year, a strategy might be to increase the number of qualified leads by 25% and a tactic will be to increase your advertising in the Cape Cod Times to 7x per week from 3x per week.

Source: Simple Steps for Starting Your Own Business – SCORE/BoA

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