Creating a digital budget that works

 Repeat after us. Not all channels are created equal.

Time and time again we see clients come onboard who brief in a ‘holistic’ digital strategy that covers every channel they can think of. Now, we are big fans of a comprehensive strategy – in fact, only one thing gets us more excited than a holistic marketing offensive; that’s results.

There is absolutely no point in spreading your budget so thin to cover all available channels that you do nothing right. Not only are you bound to drop the ball somewhere if you are under-resourced, you’re likely to fail to truly capture results strong enough to create valuable learnings.

So you can grow your revenue instead of throwing money down the drain, here are a few key steps to making the most of your digital spend:

Know your business goals
Yes, it seems obvious but you’d be surprised how many digital strategies don’t align with business goals. Understanding what your short, medium and long-term goals are is essential in creating a strategy that will both set you up with the right database, and create the channel strength to execute future business plans. 

What will ultimately help you achieve your business goals? Some digital goals may be:

• Brand awareness
• Sales
• Audience growth
• Market positioning
• Market expansion
• Social engagement 

While none of these are mutually exclusive, they each have subsets of best practice and channels that need to be factored into a strategy to get the best results.

Use your existing knowledge

Unless you are brand spanking new to digital marketing (and for sure there are still plenty of new business owners and existing operators new to the game) you will likely already have some experience with what has worked, what you couldn’t track, and where you clearly lost money. 

Have a good look at previous campaigns and see what worked and what didn’t. Then go that step further – try think of all the factors that may have contributed to these results. Where there external forces at play? Was there something in the media that sent people to your blogs that otherwise don’t gain much traction? 

Looking at your results in context can help get the best picture of what kind of campaigns and channels are most reliable for your business.

Listen to your market

This is the golden ticket. If you have the opportunity to ask your audience how they prefer to be communicated with, do it! Not all businesses are this fortunate, however, so it’s vital you try to get the clearest picture of who your target market is, then do your research on how that demographic consumes their content. 

Do they read emails? Are they online shoppers? Do they use apps? Are they browsing on a desktop? When you can see your audience’s consumption behaviours you can start to allocate funds proportionately to those areas. 

Do your research 

Spend some time researching and reading up on predicted trends. Someone will always know more and be ahead of the game. Get competitive and also learn. Do a competitive analysis to see where your industry leaders are playing, how they are playing and where you can fit in. 

There is no point adding noise to an already saturated channel – so consider whether you need to be in the same space, or if you can take a risk and focus on another area. The beauty of digital is it’s agile. You can try, then adapt as your learnings and results come in. Bringing us to the ultimate…

Track, measure..then track again 

Let’s not pretend we don’t all love and resent the measurability of digital. It can turn us into heroes and failures very very quickly, but it gives us the opportunity to assess our ROI in real time. 

If you don’t have the resources or expertise in-house find a digital expert to help you set up all the right tracking and analytics you need to measure your campaigns as they roll out. It is worth it and can save you from continuing down a road that’s leading nowhere, and vice versa; it can highlight a winning ticket you can redirect additional budget too if it’s winning.