Every business needs a solid marketing budget regardless of its industry, niche, or long-term goals. In fact, during a 2023 survey, it was stated that digital spending grew by 8.2% across different businesses and will continue to increase in the upcoming years.
With a marketing budget in place, your construction business can properly carry out its campaigns and streamline the process of measuring overall ROI or return on investment. Managing a marketing budget, keeping expenses under control, and even putting together all the moving parts of budgeting can be challenging, especially if you do not know what to do and where to start.
As a construction business owner, how do you manage your marketing budget so far? Are you good at it, or do you lack the skill? If you struggle to control your budget, you just landed on the right page.
This article will show you how to manage your marketing budget more effectively to achieve your ultimate marketing goals and set your construction business up for continuous success.
But What is a Marketing Budget?
A marketing budget details all the money your business intends to spend on marketing-related activities, goals, and initiatives over the quarter to year. A budget is a key aspect of every marketing plan. Your marketing budget should align with your marketing strategy and business goals. It determines how much money you need to spend on your campaigns.
The marketing budget may include other expenses like a new marketing staff, a registered blog domain, paid advertising, sponsored web content, and even marketing automation software. With all of these expenses, knowing how to break it down and manage it and having a plan ensure you are not affecting your profits and are spending your marketing dollars in the right places.
Several things you can keep in mind if you want to aim for a proper marketing budget:
- Take out any guesswork when planning your ongoing marketing campaign.
- Make sure to keep track of all your expenses and finances.
- Encourage your marketing team, if you have any, to sharpen and reinforce the marketing strategies.
- Make sure to discard any unprofitable marketing approach on your part.
- Keep on tracking your ROI
Setting and tracking a marketing budget can help your business decide how much of the budget must go to different aspects of the marketing campaign, giving you a better view of all your marketing expenses.
Managing Your Marketing Budget in Five Stages
With so much at stake and different marketing elements to consider – branding, marketing, promoting – it is crucial to manage your marketing budget closely. So, here are the best ways you can implement to manage your marketing spending successfully, all while prioritizing other important things that move the needle as well.
1. Set data-driven and measurable goals
Setting your marketing goals is the first step you need to set. Your marketing goals are typically a mix of short-term and long-term goals to drive revenue and sales for your construction business.
The key when it comes to setting marketing goals is to make them specific and measurable simultaneously. This makes it a lot easier for you or your team to develop marketing tactics to achieve these goals while making it easier to track the progress and allocate funds when necessary.
Once you develop your goals, you can align them with your current marketing budget. Simply doing all of this provides a strong foundation for your budget, resulting in a more effective, flexible, and sustainable marketing plan.
2. Understand your market
It would help if you had a better understanding of the nature of your target market to establish an effective marketing plan that aligns with your budget. A great start will be a research and analysis of key factors like:
- The current state of your target market: what is the demand for the construction services you offer? What factors influence such demand?
- The ever-competitive environment: Who are your competitors, and what are their strategies? Are there new competitors making their way into the market?
- Your competitive position: Who purchased your services, and why? Have you created customer personas already?
By getting to know your market and your company’s position in the place, you arm yourself with actionable and insightful data that helps you determine marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and set your budget right to meet them.
3. Build a marketing budget template
A marketing budget template is the best way to stay on top of your current marketing spend. A template allows you to set a budget and track expenses for every marketing objective. You can create your marketing budget template from scratch or download free templates online.
For a great choice, pick a template that lets you enumerate in detail and monitor all your marketing expenses in one place. This template must also let you add estimated and actual expenses, making it easier to track your overall spending against your budget and determine whether you underspent or overspent.
4. Set out marketing budget and spending proposals
Let’s say you already have your template. You can start planning your marketing budget and spending proposals. Your budget gives you a reference point for all your expenses as the year progresses, making it easier to plan and track your entire marketing spend.
A well-planned marketing budget is aligned with your marketing goals, based on a solid template, and updated in real-time, which will provide you valuable information on how much money you spend from your marketing initiatives and how much will return on you.
This oversight can help you anticipate cost overruns, calculate ROI on your marketing activities, and change strategy immediately.
5. Analyze your marketing ROI and overall spending
Analyzing your Return on Investment validates your previous marketing efforts and guides those in the future. In many ways, it gives you a great idea of which marketing channels and tactics are reinforcing your business growth, boosting your company’s profit, and bringing in new construction clients.
Part of managing your marketing budget is always keeping track of all your marketing expenses and comparing them against your ROI. You can use this information to determine if certain areas need more funding or if others are draining your resources without giving you enough return.
Where to Focus Your Marketing Budget?
Now, let’s go over where you must focus your budget spending to make the most of your budget. Here, we compile a list of digital marketing strategies that offer you greater flexibility and control over your budget, deliver the best insights to inform your upcoming marketing plans, and, most importantly, provide you with the best ROI:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Aids your marketing efforts by boosting your web pages so they appear in top search engines like Google. Whatever your budget may be, SEO is always part of the game. Local SEO is the same thing but targets potential leads in your geographic area, which is an advantage.
- Social media marketing: This is where you create content and try PPC ads on different social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter are four of the top social networks today that you must take advantage of.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing: You can create and run ads via Google, and every time someone clicks, you pay. Without spending too much, this marketing will only cost you a few cents to a couple of dollars.
- Content Marketing: You should not miss investing in content marketing. It’s worthy of your marketing dollars. You can put out blogs, eBooks, videos, and guides designed for brand awareness and attracting new customers.
- Email marketing: It’s a must-have for your business, especially if your construction company is new online. This tried-and-true method is already a staple in the marketing budget planning. Also, email marketing provides higher ROI as you connect with people who are strongly interested in your construction brand. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a $36 Return.
Common Marketing Budget Mistakes You Must Avoid
Because so many moving parts are involved in managing your marketing budget, it also means there are many avenues to making unforeseen mistakes. Any misstep in the entire process may lead to less effective management and possible financial problems for your construction company.
Below are the three biggest budget-managing mistakes you must learn to avoid:
1. Starting with bad data
Data should be present to manage your marketing budget more effectively. One of the most common mistakes everyone makes, especially regarding budget, is relying on inaccurate data. Make sure you use the correct data. You can boost your data collection and analytics capabilities to avoid any mistakes.
2. Using last year’s marketing budget
The marketing budget that worked for your construction business last year is most likely less effective the next. This is mainly because your marketing goals typically change from one year to another.
So, your budget-management process should always include a re-assessment of your company goals and a fresh new analysis of the existing market. This helps you discover factors like new technologies and the latest trends that can affect your target customer’s interest and decision-making.
3. Not adapting to changes
Change is happening quickly. It is hard to predict when a new technology, channel, and marketing approach will be a common or significant piece of your digital marketing strategy. Sometimes, spending a portion of your marketing budget on unproven tactics, like virtual reality or chatbots – may be difficult to justify. However, they may have a role to play in your future marketing efforts.
ConstructionMarketing.io Helps You Breakdown Your 2024 Budget
With the abovementioned things and the tips we share, your construction business can surely reap the benefits while keeping your expenses grounded. A well-managed marketing budget is a smart investment you will set up for your company’s success, ensuring every dollar spent has a great return!
We hope you learn everything you need to know in this article. But also, we realize that you may not have the capacity or understanding to carry out any of the strategies on your own or internally. We love to assist you. Come and partner with us!
ConstructionMarketing.io is a trusted full-service digital marketing company ready to help you in your budget breakdown this 2024! We are staffed by marketing experts and leaders who have laid down insights, visions, and tactics for your entire digital marketing plan for next year.
Also, our agency not only helps you allocate your budget but also provides digital marketing solutions embedded with personalization, a high-quality approach, and other upgrades – resulting in wider reach, effective lead acquisition, boosted sales, reinforced online reputation, and more.
If you want to know more information, contact us today.
We offer free consultation!