Is it that time of year already to set the Marketing Budget for 2019?!

We’re still in Quarter 4 an already talking about the 12 months of next year!  Have you thought about how much to set aside for your marketing budget?  Have you thought where you’ll allocate your marketing spend?  Will it all be online?  Will you keep some for offline marketing such as radio?

So, how much should your marketing budget be?

We believe that best practice indicates that between 6-8% of business turnover should be allocated to marketing.  Some businesses opt for higher than that, some for lower.  It depends on the resources available to your business.  It also depends on what return on investment you’d like to get.

What’s hot for 2019?

Marketing trends show a huge increase in video consumption.

  • There are 1.8 billion users on YouTube every month.  That figure is only the logged in figure.
  • 70% of YouTube traffic is on mobile.
  • 1 billion hours of video content is watched on YouTube daily.
  • 576,000 hours of video are uploaded every day on YouTube.
  • More than one hour of YouTube is watched every day by logged in users on average.
  • The average time spent on YouTube per session is 40 minutes.

And these figures are all increasing!

There’s lots of ways to spend your marketing budget from Facebook advertising, to Google shopping to Email Marketing to trade shows.  However, if your business wants to be where your consumers are in 2019, then you need to be creating compelling video content.  You heard it here first!

However, what you do with that video content is also important.  There’s no point in spending lots of your budget on video production.  You need to share the content everywhere – your website, social media channels and email marketing.

Don’t blow the budget in January 2019!

Remember that your marketing budget needs to last the full 12 months of the year.  Therefore, don’t blow it all in January or indeed quarter one of 2019.  Plan the year out and allocate the budget for each planned item.  Look at cost effective ways of marketing, particularly email marketing.

Plan, plan, plan.

Money put into marketing is no good without a plan.  Map out each month what you’d like to do and then price everything out.  What investment will give you the best return?  Are there peaks and troughs in your business?  For example, in the car business there are generally peaks in the first and third quarters of the year with new car sales.  When do you advertise these new cars?  You generally see advertising from around now until the end of the year in the car market.  It makes sense to promote the business before the busy time, not necessarily in the middle of the busy time.  Perhaps the same is true of your business?

Do you need help?

Lush Marketing can help you to allocate your marketing budget effectively and plan the year ahead for you.  Marketing strategy is one of our strengths and with this goes planning and budget setting.   Contact us https://lushmarketing.ie/contact/ to find out more.