How much budget should I put into digital?

Transcript

– I often get asked a lot, what sort of budget should be put in digital marketing. And the reality is, it completely depends on your business. If you’ve never ever touched digital before, it’s always been something you thought about doing and never done before, I don’t want you to go running to your marketing department and to your Managing Director, asking for tens of thousands of pounds to try regenerate the game. It’s a really interesting question, really because, you know, there’s no right or wrong answer. There’s no minimum that will make something work, there’s no maximum where something will necessarily max out. It’s different for every brand, every objective and every market.

– I think it very much depends on how much you’ve experimented with different marketing before, how much money you’re comfortable putting into marketing. If you already know that your sales are 80% driven through the web and 80% of your business is digital, then that gives you a good place to start on how your marketing budget should be split and allocated. But if you’re starting, from sort of ground zero and you’ve never tried anything before, I’d recommend starting small.

– The reality is, you need to start where you feel comfortable. Don’t start with some risky budget that cold blow you out of the water. Start with a budget that you know is going to be enough to get started and enough to be able to analyse. What we often see in the world of digital marketing is you have a budget that kind of is too small to really get any results or too small to get any sort of feedback and data. And the reality is the best thing for you to do is to use something like Google Keyword Research where you can really find out what actually is happening in the market, how people are looking for certain terms. And play around with it.

– From a PPC point of view, you should utilise the tools such as Google Keyword Planner to work out what sort of competition is out there already. How much you’re willing to spend on a click and see how many people are searching for your product or your service.

– What I would say though is you have to consider the different things that are at play. So if you look at the current situation which we find ourselves in now, things like billboards, out of home, you know, are less, you know, less exposed than they were before. Before people were locked inside their houses. So because of that advertisers have got to be where the eyes are. We’ve always been very consistent, advertisers need to be where the consumers are looking.

– And then factor in as well how much you actually want to spend on your digital marketing and on your PPC campaigns. So if you only really have a reasonable budget of £1000 then that’s perfectly fine, go for that. If you’ve got something smaller, again, that’s fine. We get no end of people who are like, well I tried digital once and I put all of our budget into it and I blew all of our budget and we have nothing to show for it. And that’s, it’s risky and it can put you off. So if you have one bad experience then you could put a Director off that form of marketing forever. And it doesn’t necessarily mean digital marketing is a write off for your company.

– What I want you to do in the early days is not be too fixated on a set budget, but have a budget that is fluid. As you start seeing return, increase it. But far too many brands will go out there straight away and go all on digital marketing, for their budget to be wiped out straight away. So be quite conservative at the start, make sure you’re tracking return of investment, make sure you’re looking at real data points, and as it starts bringing in return, scale up as required.

– If you’re going to get a reasonable return on investment for that amount, there’s no use ploughing thousands of thousands into a campaign if you’re not going to make a substantial return on that.

– Now historically that was on TV, you know, when consumers would watch TV. They’d watch it for long periods of time and they’d take in things that were shown to them. Now what we’ve seen is that during the ad breaks, the eyes go away from the TV and they’re into the phone now. So that means as advertisers, we need to instead be in the phone. I think the question is is not necessarily how much you should be spending on it, but you should always be pursuing where the eyes of your target market are. So the answer to that question, is that there isn’t necessarily a right answer, there isn’t necessarily a wrong answer. It’s always going to have to be based around where you target market’s eyes are looking. That’s where you need to be.