How to Allocate Budget for Digital Marketing in 2022

October 31st 2022 | By Steve Grant

With such a high proportion of the world’s population spending much of their lives online, Digital marketing and search engine optimisation can be considered essential to business growth. It’s probably why so many organisations are increasing their digital marketing budgets.

You may be thinking about doing the same. But are you clear on how to spend your marketing budget? If not, read on as we share some expert top tips to help you get the best possible return on investment.

Digital marketing and SEO involve a variety of elements. It’s important to be able to connect with customers in a range of ways, so there will always be that challenge of how to allocate budget for digital marketing activities in such a way that you cover every base. Let’s run through a few important steps.

Identify your digital marketing goals

The best way to start planning your digital marketing budget is to set out your goals. You could do this for three or six months, or for the whole year ahead. Having goals in place will help you to prioritise the strategies that will require your biggest focus.

For example, if your goal is to generate more leads from your website, then you will need to be focusing on an SEO campaign that will boost your online visibility. One that includes all aspects of search engine marketing, including on-page SEO, content marketing, and off-page and technical SEO.

You’ll need to be investing in conversion optimisation, ensuring your website user journey is spot-on, and making sure your web traffic is well targeted so that you get more of the right leads for the best possible return on investment from your SEO.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to increase brand awareness and customer engagement, you may be better placed allocating a larger proportion of your digital marketing budget to social media engagement or influencer marketing, for example.

Review past results

Once you’re clear on what you want to achieve over the next few months or for the longer term, the next step is to review your past results. This will help when it comes to how to allocate budget for digital marketing strategies.

Some of the things to look at would be which channels have returned the best results for you, based on your objectives. And then conversely, which haven’t performed as well as you’d anticipated.

It’s important to proceed with caution here, however. You’ll need to look closely at why certain digital marketing tactics didn’t work. Maybe it was because you didn’t allocate enough of your marketing budget to it. Perhaps it was because you didn’t adopt the right approach, or your chosen digital marketing partner didn’t properly understand your industry, audience, needs or goals.

Calculating your return on investment (ROI) is a vital exercise at this stage if you are going to make the most of your digital marketing budget. Our guide, how to measure return on investment from SEO, will help you determine how much profit your SEO spend has delivered. You can use the same principles to calculate your ROI for other digital marketing activities too.

Consider your options

Digital marketing is something of a complex area involving many tactics and strategies. Pinning down the ones that will best help you achieve your business goals and therefore how to spend your marketing budget can be tricky. This is where outside strategic advice can be highly valuable.

For example, with SEO, depending on your current ranking positions and how much you want to grow your leads or sales, you could be looking at back-linking campaigns, blog posting, visual content creation such as infographics and videos, e-book publishing, newsletters or online reputation management (e.g. Google reviews). It may even be necessary to rebuild your website for SEO.

Also think about the software you’re going to need to support your digital marketing efforts. The cost of this software will need to be factored into your marketing budget.

Things like social media scheduling tools; project management and collaboration platforms; email marketing software; marketing automation software and content creation tools all add to your marketing costs.

Finally, don’t be afraid to try some new tactics. Naturally, you will research them thoroughly first and ascertain how well they are working for your competitors, and the potential ROI they could get you.

But it’s important not to discard something off hand just because you haven’t tried it before. Testing and experimenting play an important role in marketing and you never know, you may stumble across something that works so well, you’ll wonder how you ever got on without it.

Allocate your digital marketing budget

So, how to allocate budget for digital marketing activities?

Ideally, you will allocate between 7 and 15 per cent of your total turnover to marketing. Once you have made that call, you can start splitting your marketing budget up across various strategies, focusing on the tactics that have served you well in the past with a good ROI, whilst making sure they are aligned with your business goals.

There is no one-strategy-fits-all with digital marketing. Every business is different, so when it comes to how to spend your marketing budget, you will need to make sure it fits your needs on an individual level. From your goals and your audiences to your industry and your competition, there is a whole host of factors that will influence how you allocate your marketing budget.

Looking to get the most out of your digital marketing budget?

Strategy planning is vital if you are going to get the most out of your digital marketing budget. And so is partnering with an SEO agency that takes time to understand your business and makes sure that whatever tactics you employ are firmly focused on achieving your business goals.

At Figment, this is precisely our approach. We specialise in tailored SEO campaigns that achieve results, increase leads and sales, and ultimately, drive business growth for our clients.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help boost your sales and grow your business through a value-added SEO campaign, you are welcome to get in touch.