When it comes to running your digital marketing campaign, there are different options available to you. You could manage your marketing campaign in-house, use freelancers, or bring an agency on board.

Enlisting the help of an agency means you will have a team of knowledgeable professionals at your disposal to assist you with every aspect of your campaign. They can help you allocate funds to the right channels for optimal growth and success.

Here are other areas that individuals can focus on in growing their digital campaign budget:

What are your priorities?

Now that you have decided what and where you want to see results, you can make the most of your money and your time by allocating a budget to help achieve those results.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

  • Who is my target audience and how do we reach them?
  • What is the spend per platform going to be?

If you don't produce the content in-house, you will have to get someone to create it for you. This will be a first expense. Depending on how much content you need to produce for the campaign, a fixed amount to create content will need to be paid. Then you will decide how much to put towards getting that content out to the right audience.

Many different factors impact how much money you will need and where you're going to be spending it. Will SEO be needed? If it's a brand campaign and it's primarily living on social, then SEO isn't important. It becomes essential, however, if you're going to be doing search ads and you want to rank for your content.

Cost per click is another strategy that is good for driving more qualified traffic through to your site while mitigating spending crucial budget on vanity metrics such as impressions. Deciding on the right tools and platforms will depend mainly on the outcomes you would like to achieve.

In general, a large part of the budget will be spent on creating great content, and then a proportionate amount will be spent on promoting it. So, with a budget for a lead generation campaign, 60-75% is spent on the actual production of content (workflows, emails, landing pages, assets, social copy and designs) and then about 25% would go to put it in front of the right audience.

Timelines are important

No matter how much money is spent on a campaign, it won't perform well unless it has enough time. So if you are just starting off, you might find that you have exciting content, but no one is interacting with it because you don't have any followers to engage with it.

On the other hand, if your campaign time is too long and you don't have enough budget, then you're going to run out of budget before your campaign ends — and you're going to miss out on leads.

Use the data

It's essential to map out timelines that are realistic for the budget, and it is generally recommended that you wait at least three months to see what is performing or not performing.

The advantage of using digital marketing is that you can consult the data at any time to see if your efforts are bearing fruit or if it might be a good idea to focus them in another direction. You can use this information to adjust your budget if you need to.

Be agile

One key factor is understanding that everything will not work and some things will work better than expected. You will need to be agile with your budget so that it can be used to the best of the campaign's advantage. If something isn't working well, you will be able to tweak your budget and direct it somewhere else to get better results.

How much is enough?

Your budget will ultimately take into account the tools that you would like to use for your digital marketing efforts and the human resources required to run them. And you will divide the money you have available in proportion to their value and how much growth you would like to see in each area. But where do you get that initial figure from in the first place?

Here are three areas suggested by Forbes that individuals can use when approaching this:

  • cost of advertising — where you allocate funds according to how much it will cost you to acquire a customer
  • revenue per customer — where you look at advertising spending in terms of return on investment and your goals for customer acquisition, and
  • percentage of your total revenue — where your marketing budget is set in relation to how much you should spend based on your organisation's size.

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