The price of marketing

How do you determine your marketing budget and the costs that go along with your marketing strategy. It all depends of what type of company you work for. If you are a large business, it will be easy to have a large marketing budget. If you are a non-profit company or a smaller budget, you typically cannot afford to spend a lot on marketing costs. Looking at your marketing costs are a great way to determine what can be cut out and what needs to be expanded. Spending time working on a marketing strategy and following through with proper procedures will also help your company in more ways than one.

Determining how much to spend on your marketing budget is a tricky thing. Many companies are switching their focus to viral marketing since it is essentially free marketing. Viral marketing campaigns both online and off are especially important to small businesses and start-ups because they usually cost almost nothing. The real investment in getting a viral marketing campaign going is the time and effort that it takes to build a product worth talking about. That means that the small businesses that have more creativity than marketing dollars can still find themselves turning a nice profit thanks to a healthy influx of referred customers.

We have seen viral marketing at work time and time again in Hollywood. You see a movie, you think it's great and you refer it to a friend and so on. How did "Napoleon Dynamite" become so popular? By viral marketing. It was a cheaply made independent film that grossed millions of dollars and also paved the way for Jon Heder to become a movie star.

Developing a marketing strategy with an effective marketing budget requires time, energy, knowledge, and information. Today's customer wants to know what's in it for them. Customers want a deal or a discount or some type of incentive that makes it worth their time.

Like it or not, but the discounts that are given come out of the marketing budget. This can potentially cost your marketing department hundreds or thousands of dollars. Factoring this cost into your marketing budget is critical and many marketers do not this of this.

The price of marketing
What areas are the largest expense to marketing? Advertising and PR. Think of the super-bowl ads; companies spend millions of dollars for 30-60 seconds of promoting their company or product. Yet again, you need to determine if your marketing budget is in the range of millions of dollars that can be spent on advertising like this.

Advertising also includes online ads, radio spots, and print media. It is by far the biggest expense of the marketing budget.

PR isn't far behind advertising. If you outsource your PR, you probably are spending a lot of money compared to a company who has their own PR firm inside the company. Since PR is in charge of the image of the company, they too require a lot of money to keep the company looking good in the public. They need to back up what the advertising team does.

Let's not forgot another key ingredient in the marketing budget; customer service. No matter how well the entire marketing department does, their entire campaign can go down the drain without good customer service.

If you are in direct contact with your customers, you want to make them feel important. You need to have good policies in place that show the customer you care about their needs and wants.

Marketing comes with a price, no matter what way you decide to market. Just be sure you are setting realistic goals for yourself and following through with them. Anyone can find success by spending proper time and care on their marketing budget.