Understanding the data you collect is a key factor in determining a realistic and achievable budget. An effective marketing budget should be driven by data. There are seven main sectors you should collect and review prior to developing your marketing budget.
Gather and Review Data from the following:
- Financial: Gather revenue and expense data for the past year.
- Goals: Understand the organizational goals for 2017. What goals are there? Are they growth goals? Maintenance goals?
- Leads: Determine which marketing tactics generated quality, measurable leads.
- ROI: Calculate your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and your customer lifetime value (CLV).
- Competitors: Evaluate how your competitors are spending their marketing dollars and the gaps that you can leverage. A digital audit can help with this data.
- Cycles: Identify the average sales cycle for each of your product lines.
- Personas: Determine and understand the pain points of your potential prospects (not what you want them to know about your service).
Marketing is constantly changing, and looks more different than ever today. By collecting this data ,you can determine what works and what doesn’t. With this information, you can develop a detailed and successful marketing budget to propel your company into 2017.
