If you’re a small business, what’s the best way to budget and how much should you spend? If you’re like 67% of small businesses you’re spending just about $2,000 a year on your marketing—which depending on your industry can be too much or too little. Many small businesses struggle to even create an intelligent marketing budget, and some will just pick a number and go with it. We can do better than this and should use the best budgeting plan possible to get the most ROI on marketing spend.
For a lot of companies, $5,000 could save or significantly help the business survive another year. This shows how fragile a good amount of small businesses are and the need to wisely plan the money they have for sustainable growth. When given the hypothetical option of getting $5,000, the number one choice of where to spend the money by small businesses was on marketing materials, with 27% of respondents choosing that as the first choice. This proves that small business owners know they need to invest more in marketing, but often don’t have the surplus budget to do so.
There are different methods of budgeting, and you have to find out what works best for your business, but you should choose wisely and with all the information. Some popular methods outlined below in the infographic below include the dollar approach, the percent of sales approach, the match competitor method, and the marketing plan objective method. Each budgeting plan has its pros and cons with different levels of difficulty of implementing and effectiveness once implemented.
A printing company, Coastal Creative Reprographics, created this infographic on the current state of small business budgets and how to improve them. Take a look and use it as a launching point for reevaluating your marketing plan budgeting for 2014.
Published: November 14, 2013
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2551 Views
