Need a helping hand with your Social Media Marketing? Don’t be shy! Contact the team at Stellar Marketing for a chat.

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First published by: ADAM FIFIELD | NOVEMBER 19, 2015 | mention.com

It’s not quite an age old question (yet), but it’s just as important. And it’s a popular thing to be thinking about this time of year: how much should you be spending on digital marketing?

If you spend too little, your message won’t make it to your target audience. If you spend too much, you won’t have the budget you need for other important aspects of your marketing plan.

So how much do you spend, and what do you spend it on? Before January 1 rolls around, you need to figure out:

• How much money to spend on digital marketing
• How much of that goes to each tactic – social, email, SEM, etc.
• What tools you need, and how much they cost
• Other expenses you need to plan for

1.     Start with a clear direction

The first step in any plan is to pick a direction and set your goal. What will be your marketing team’s main focus next year?

Do you want to build brand awareness? Do you want to increase your customer base by 5% each month? Do you want to better help customers you already have?

Before you set your marketing budget, you need to determine your marketing goals. Otherwise, you won’t know what that budget is expected to cover. For example, you can’t set your PPC budget without actually thinking about what campaigns you’re going to be running, what they’ll look like, and the price range your keywords might fall in.

By the time you’re spending next year’s money, you need to know not just what you’re doing, but how much of it. Setting goals won’t just help you pick a final number, it also narrows your focus.

2. Analyse past efforts

What strategies did you spend your money on last year? And of those, which ones were most successful? Which ones were a dud? Which ones showed promise for future tests?

Whether you’re measuring retweets, email subscribers, or leads generated. For any stage of the marketing funnel, conduct a brief postmortem. If something worked well in the past, consider why, and if you need to increase spend to take it further. If it didn’t, think about why as well, along with what could’ve turned it around.

Allocate money to different strategies based on their success, not their actual cost. Even though posting to Twitter is technically free, if Twitter marketing is working well for you, you want to toss some more money at that initiative.

For projects that aren’t going well, you have two options: kill it off and spend the money elsewhere, or figure out how to improve them.

And don’t forget to set aside some cash for testing new strategies – a lot of marketers keep 20% reserved for experimenting and trying new things.

But however you choose to divide things, don’t start off 2016 by throwing more money at ineffective marketing channels.

3. Research industry trends

While you obviously shouldn’t copy your competitors’ marketing strategies, you should know what they’re doing. Also, you need to be up to date on industry trends.

Do other companies use social media or email newsletters more to stay in touch with customers?

Does your landing page look out of date?

Are you ranking way below your competitors in search?

Have you focused your efforts on direct mail or radio advertising while your competitors have been connecting with customers online?

It’s way too easy to spy on your competitors online, whether it’s through SEO or social.

Depending on the tactic, you either want to catch up or stand out. If something’s working for your competition, make it work for you. But if you see them stumbling, use their mistakes to figure out how to stand out. Use your competitive intel to get ahead!

4. Crunch the numbers

Once you’ve set your goals, analysed your past campaigns, and researched industry trends, it’s time to crunch the numbers.

Fortunately, Leadgenix has an easy-to-use budget calculator that does the hard work for you. All you have to do is answer 4 simple questions and the calculator will work out the rest.

So how does this calculator work?

It uses a few established industry trends to set a baseline:

1. Your total marketing budget should usually be between 5% and 15% of your total revenue. The calculator uses a rough estimate of 9%.
2. Digital marketing should make up a substantial portion of your overall marketing budget. In general, 10%-50% of your total marketing budget should be used for digital.

Once a digital marketing budget baseline has been established, the budget is divided into 4 areas: SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing.

5. Use your budget to make the biggest impact

Deciding how much to spend is a good place to start, but you still need to make sure each dollar goes as far as it possibly can.

If you really want the most for your money, you need to be using it to make some quality marketing happen.

That means your marketing needs to be great. Keep a few things in mind:

• Consistency is essential. Keep your core message the same, whether you’re sharing content through email newsletters, Twitter, or Facebook.
• Invest in quality. Your marketing content represents your brand, your values, your products, and your services. It’s essential to invest in the help you need, whether that means hiring a full-time web designer, splurging for the nice software, or handing your social media accounts over to an agency.
• Cater to your target audience. Knowing your audience will determine not only what you share, but how you share it. If they’re reading email on mobile, you need to design your newsletter for that. If they spend a lot of time on Twitter and none on Snapchat, your social media strategy’s distribution should be similar.

Make 2016 your best year yet

Digital marketing is becoming more important each year—don’t get left behind. Determine your digital marketing budget for 2016 and make it count.

Need a helping hand with your Digital Marketing Strategy? Don’t be shy! Contact the team at Stellar Marketing for a chat.

The post 5 Tips to Nail Down Your 2016 Digital Marketing Budget appeared first on Stellar Marketing.

Below is Ken Burgin’s original article, also available here.

Just as you thought you were getting your head around social media, Facebook has made it more difficult for you to target prospective diners. But spending a little will deliver big returns writes Ken Burgin.

People are frustrated that ‘free’ promotion on Facebook doesn’t work anymore. But most of your Facebook fans never saw your posts. Until last year, about 20 percent of what you put on your page was seen by them, but now it’s just a fraction of that. In 2015 and going forward, if you really want to be seen, you’ll have to pay. In fact, the options for targeted ads to reach exactly the people you want are much more exciting than the random results of free posting.

Want to just reach local mothers with young children, for a mid-morning promotion? You can do that with precise targeting that won’t be seen by anyone else, and the ad will only show on a weekday. How about a special offer for males over 40 within 20km, who like wine? That’s easy to organise. Even better, if you have an email list you can run ads that just show to these people, and create another much larger list of people who ‘look like’ them but have probably never visited. This is powerful stuff!

We’re not talking about the Boost button that appears on the bottom of each post, tempting you to spend $20 to reach more people. It’s not totally ineffective, but resist that and go to the Ads Manager, where a whole world of opportunity opens up. Use ads to get people to click through to your website, respond to a particular post you’ve put up (eg announcing a coupon or menu change), get more page ‘Likes’ or promote an event.

The Ads Manager also gives options to set up special Custom Audiences by uploading your email or SMS list – another reason it’s important to keep collecting contacts. Facebook compares your list with the profiles it has, and if they match, adds them to your Custom Audience. In my experience, you’re likely to match 40 to 50 percent of your own list. You can then use part of this list for targeting your ads, for example young males on your list for a football night, or women who say they are engaged. You can also use part of your list to create a special Custom Audience, like club members who have not renewed; they can be targeted with a special renewal offer that no-one else would see, and at much less than the cost of a mail out.

Another Custom Audience is one based on people who’ve visited your website. Facebook has a method for you to add a ‘pixel’ (a piece of code) on your website that is activated every time someone opens a web page where the code is installed. This piece of code sends general, hashed, information about the actions people take on the website to Facebook to help the advertiser target ads to the those people. For example, people who visit your Functions page could become another Custom Audience that starts to see ads related to your event packages.

Once you’ve created a Custom Audience, you can build a Lookalike Audience. Facebook explains ‘We look at the common qualities of the people in your source audience, such as demographics and interests, and then find the people who “look like” your source audience the most.’ If your email list is 5,000, this could give you a matched Custom Audience on Facebook of say 2,000. From this, you could build a local Lookalike Audience of maybe 20,000 to 40,000 (proportions based on my own use of this tool). From this new and much larger audience you’ve now got a solid number of leads to use for very targeted Facebook advertising.

Excited by this? I am! With 13 million Aussies using Facebook, most of them daily, the options are fantastic. Look around your venue – more than 80 percent of your customers use Facebook, and some of them are on it right now. It’s time to explore this new advertising frontier.

What’s all this cost?

• If you want to build fan numbers, you’ll probably pay 60 to 70c each, using the ‘Promote your Page’ option in the Ads Manager.
• A carefully targeted campaign with a link to your web page offer could cost as little as 20c per click, using the Boost Your Posts option. Once people reach your website, it’s up to you to have an offer good enough to buy.
• Start with a campaign that costs $10 per day and watch it over a week. Track the results and compare to the $70 you spent. If it’s a good return, rinse and repeat!

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