Tips to follow for 2021 marketing budget

2020 is an unfortunate year for everybody and also for the marketing professionals, due to the impact of the health crisis linked to Covid-19 and the strong changes in consumer practices that have resulted from it. So, have you started planning for 2021? As the New Year always brings an enormous amount of possibilities!

Marketing is usually not free. And, .any marketers fear creating annual budgets - because they know that their CEOs, CFOs, and other decision-makers will analyze each item, line by line. Thus, the great art now is to implement the planned budget without cuts. Targeted and good preparation for the budget presentation is therefore essential.

To create the best budget for 2021 - one that can deftly defend together from top management - follow these strategies. In the following article, we have put together some tips on how to do

Understand the priorities

It is crucial to be prepared at any time to adjust your marketing budget for 2021. Mid-2020 budget adjustments forced many companies to prioritize short-term cash flow and what could easily be paused. In 2021, you need to quickly understand what activities are essential compared to those that you could cut down on. For this, think about:

Determine what makes certain actions more critical than others: ROI is important here, but there are other points to assess - such as the importance of this activity for growth, as part of your differentiation strategy, or whether it is critical to reducing risk.
Create a rating system: really understanding which activities are most important to drive impact will help you to make you better decisions. This can even be a useful exercise to review on a quarterly basis.
Set contingency budgets: Maintaining backup budgets will help your company understand exactly what to adjust based on increases or decreases in your budget.

Determine how much you want to spend

The first step in creating a solid marketing budget is to determine how much you have to spend and how much you need to spend to get the results you want. There are two real ways to do this.

The first is to use the marketing budget ratio (marketing investment to be divided by total revenue). But the percentage you have to budget does not depend only on revenue - it also depends on your growth goals.

The second approach is to determine the exact cost of a consumer's purchase cycle. It means you must determine how much you need to invest to find a new potential buyer, attract it and turn it into a customer. This is the most detailed and difficult way to determine your marketing budget, but just like in some activities (such as increasing brand awareness) it becomes difficult to determine ROI.

Invest in your brand in the long run

Poorly planned budget cuts can impact a reduction in brand visibility and communications - critical during an economic crisis. When you plan your marketing budget for 2021, you can create a plan focused on maintaining the relationship and trust of your customers and potential leads. This strategy can result in better market positioning during the recovery. This plan should focus on:

Investing organically increases activities that contribute to organic brand mentions and positions, such as actions with influencers or SEO. And, this can help build your visibility on search and social media.
Maintain media investments: organic and paid tactics work best when both work in parallel. Abrupt changes in your paid investment can have a disastrous impact on your brand visibility. Reduce if necessary - but don't stop.

Stay focused on ROI

It is essential to show the result of marketing as a department, but also to understand the impact of individual actions and campaigns. To do this, your company must: Investing in analytics: tracking revenue can be complex if you don't have the right tools and professionals. Having experts at this point will bring you closer to the final result.

Direct your team to evaluate efficiency metrics: in addition to the experts, your team needs to have this mindset focused on analysis and planning, so it will be more agile to adjust the tactics that will generate the greatest return.

Conclusion

You cannot plan for uncertainty, but you can be ready for what lies ahead. Planning a marketing budget can be tricky at best, let alone when there is so much economic uncertainty to be considered. Nobody knows for sure what the future holds, but you need to have a flexible mindset and an optimized budget plan to be successful. That way, you can be ready to take advantage of any increase in demand and new opportunities to boost your business growth during the economic recovery.

The Technology Headlines