How do you allocate resources for marketing communication?

3 Assess your resources

Once you have defined your objectives and your audience, you need to assess your available resources for marketing communication. This includes your budget, your time, and your skills. How much money can you spend on marketing communication? How much time can you dedicate to planning, executing, and evaluating your campaigns? What skills do you have in-house and what skills do you need to outsource or hire? By assessing your resources, you can prioritize your activities and allocate them accordingly. For example, if you have a limited budget, you might focus on low-cost or free tools like social media, blogs, or referrals, and avoid expensive tools like TV, radio, or billboards. If you have a tight deadline, you might focus on quick and easy tools like email, SMS, or chatbots, and avoid time-consuming tools like webinars, podcasts, or ebooks. If you have a skilled team, you might focus on creating high-quality and engaging content, and avoid outsourcing or hiring external agencies.

4 Evaluate your options

After assessing your resources, you need to evaluate your options for marketing communication. This means comparing the costs and benefits of different tools and channels, and selecting the ones that best suit your objectives, your audience, and your resources. You can use various criteria and methods to evaluate your options, such as return on investment (ROI), cost per action (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLV), or SWOT analysis. For example, if you want to evaluate the ROI of a tool, you can divide the revenue generated by the tool by the cost of the tool. If you want to evaluate the CPA of a tool, you can divide the cost of the tool by the number of actions taken by the users. If you want to evaluate the CLV of a tool, you can multiply the average revenue per customer by the average retention rate of the tool. If you want to evaluate the SWOT of a tool, you can list the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the tool.

5 Implement your plan

The final step in allocating resources for marketing communication is implementing your plan. This means executing your selected tools and channels, monitoring your progress, and adjusting your strategy as needed. You can use various tools and techniques to implement your plan, such as project management software, calendars, checklists, or dashboards. For example, if you want to implement a social media campaign, you can use a project management software to assign tasks, set deadlines, and track milestones. You can use a calendar to schedule your posts, a checklist to ensure quality and consistency, and a dashboard to monitor your metrics and feedback.

6 Learn from your results

The last but not least factor to consider when allocating resources for marketing communication is learning from your results. This means analyzing your data, measuring your performance, and identifying your strengths and weaknesses. You can use various tools and methods to learn from your results, such as surveys, analytics, reports, or tests. For example, if you want to learn from your email marketing campaign, you can use a survey to collect feedback from your subscribers, an analytics tool to track your open, click, and bounce rates, a report to summarize your findings and recommendations, and a test to experiment with different variables and optimize your results.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?