Unless you have a limitless cash inflow, how you spend your digital marketing budget is an important topic to discuss with your team.

The biggest punch line of this article is this:

EVERYONE must spend BIG on Facebook and Instagram ads. They are ridiculously underpriced with very low CPM, promising your brand massive attention and significant conversion if done right.

However, that said, this is rather broad advice. And not every kind of business would be sold to it. After all, a lot depends on their own unique needs, target audience, and goals.

If you’re in the same spot, debating with your team how you should spend your digital marketing budget in 2020, here are two steps to figure it out:

  1. Identify Your Needs and Objectives

What do you want to achieve?

Right now, do you want to sell more? Are you trying to build your brand reputation? Are you trying to consolidate your target audience across different channels? Do you want to increase your customer retention rate?

The distribution of your budget depends on the primary and secondary objectives of your marketing plan.

For example, if you’re trying to build a brand, your budget should be spent extensively on creative – to help your brand story-tell across channels and then connect with the right audience.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to improve your retention rate, you must spend on after-sale strategy, which would include purchasing advanced email platforms and automation solutions like Ontraport.

So, to begin with, outline your short and long-term goals. They will give you a fair idea of where you should allocate your digital marketing budget.

  1. Find Out About Your Target Audience

Creating buyer personas is essential. Not only it helps you understand where to spend your budget the most, but it also unveils seamless opportunities to optimize the returns.

Who are you targeting? What are their needs? What are their pain points? What kind of solutions are they looking for? Where do they live? What is their budget?

Having buyer personas will help you answer these central questions.

And once you have the right answers on your target audience, you can accord it with your own goals. In the process, you will automatically find out about the platforms that you should be focusing more on with your time and money.

For example, if your target audience is top-level executives in Fortune 500, you’re more likely to engage them on LinkedIn than Instagram. If you’re targeting aged 14-19 teens, Snapchat is your go-to. If you’re targeting college-going students in your city, Facebook targeted ads, as well as Google AdWords, should take the biggest pie of your budget.

Conclusion

Broadly put, allocating your digital marketing budget isn’t a difficult task.

However, things become a challenge if you’re capital-crunched and want to make $1 worth $100. In such a case, your spending must be thoughtfully distributed among different channels to maximize the returns.

If you focus on three fundamental questions, you can easily know how you should spend your capital. And the three questions are:

  • What do you want to achieve through digital marketing in the next 6 months?
  • Who are you targeting?
  • Which channels are enjoying the most attention of your target audience?

Good luck!