Manager or Owner? Divide your marketing budget correctly from now on!

If you don't know this meme btw ^ - look up 'kid doing math' on YouTube! :)

You probably already have a clue on how to divide the budget and are already doing it somehow. Though, I'm glad you clicked onto this article and are open to read about my take on it. Scrol to the bottom, make sure it's not long and give it a quick read. :)

1. Test Hypotheses !!! - What is that? And how to pronounce it?

If you're in a position of tipping into a new market with your service, or making / already have a product, or coming up with a new campaign, or you're just looking how to boost your ads on the short and long-term -> this is something you MUST DO.

What is a hypothesis? - It is an 'assumption' that you make for 'why' people would choose your product. It can sound like:

"People will convert more if we SCREAM in our ads that our software is the most comfortable and easy to get used to".

And then you go and keep on testing if it proves itself true.

Usually this part of creating and testing hypotheses is skipped by… literally everyone. No one does in-depth quality interviews with their current and possible clients with simply asking them about:

-? 'why' they would buy your product / or product of your kind (brainstorming about many factors)

- what don't they like in your product / such products (working on objections)

- what would it give them if they have your product (feeling, position on the market,

to later make more 'hypotheses' out of this - so you can prove them with quantitative data.

Your mind is now probably like: "yeah of course, of cooourse we gonna do it… I already know a few factors / know there's a space in that market for me, that'd be enough. All that takes so much time. Whom we gonna interview? And we don't know how to do it correctly and fast anyway".

- Well, I've burned biiiiig budgets by giving it to monopolies like Google and Facebook with tears in my eyes, seeing clients coming up with a generic strategy that didn't make them stand out from the majority of their competitors's ads you see in the feeds, nor did they stand out with the whole on-website communication / strategy.

"Typical case: We are the best marketing software" or "Buy our shit". - "Huh, okay..."

You think you may know - but you don't know. You see a 6, when you have to see a 9. And to see it - you have to talk to people and understand their perspective.

All you should realize - spending 1 month and some money on a good in-depth research - can make sure you don't burn your budgets for years after. To that, you can get 2-3x better results from every of your campaigns.

- "Okay Vlad, convinced about making hypotheses. How to do it, what to ask, how to form them? What to do with them later?"

Well, - I'm gonna say straight - I don't know how to do them right. I'm not an expert in this. But what I can do is to set you up with some experts! ;)

2. Give half to SEO.

What is SEO? - SEO is a long-term investment into a stable FREE traffic.

Hire a well-skilled SEO-freelancer. And a well-skilled copywriter. Is it all it is to pay for? No, there is also a budget you'd need to pay for other sources sending traffic to your website (think high-traffic websites/blogs, influencers). This all puts you higher in Google organic searches and ensures a stable long-term influx of traffic.

Don't hire an all-around marketer - hire a designated SEO specialist. Why a freelancer? Because she/he often has a higher expertise and does things faster and way more efficiently than an employee you may afford.

And they often have better experience than an SEO-specialist at a marketing agency.

Looking for one? - Hit me up! :)

3. Reserve budget on creative ads. And on editing those ads. And on creating and testing new ads.

In short, reserve more than you can expect.

4. Reserve the budget for reporting.

Atomizing your reporting / visualizing the data you want and need is a priority. Ask a data-specialist and your digital marketer to help you build a dashboard. This will save much time and money for you potentially.

5. Finally, Paid Traffic. How to split the budget here between channels?

Here is a simple calculation. By knowing either industry average or your own average KPI benchmarks on certain channels, you can come up with how much traffic you'll buy for how much money. What's more - probably even with how much money you'll earn back! ;)

I can't add an image here, so you'll have to open-up your excel and do some math. Sorry.

If you know your average CPM (cost to show an ad 1000 times), you can check how many times you can show your ads by putting in your budget number multiplied by the CPM.

Second action, you take your own or estimate a Click-Through-Ratio (CTR). So what's the percentage of people clicking thu? - And you multiply the Impressions by that to see the Traffic that you'll receive. By dividing the budget by traffic - you see the cost per website visitor.

Third action, do you know what's the Conversion Rate percentage on your website? And what's better - for the audience that comes from this or that marketing channel? (Can be checked in Google Analytics). If you know it - you can multiply it by traffic to see how many Conversions you will get! :)

And once you know it, divide your budget by the number of conversions to see how much your Conversion would cost you.

For Google Search Ads this works a bit different. There you'll have to crawl into a Keyword Planner and export a list of keywords that you wanna show up for and later visualize the data.

6. And for the desert: how to split the budget within the Paid Traffic channels?!

Think of your flow. Are you attracting traffic to certain LPs / blogs that you think / know from Google Analytics that they are good? Are you A/B testing those LPs?

Or are you going straight for traffic or conversions? - Well, you never know what works best until you test it. ;)

Make sure that all your campaigns / ad groups get the minimum required and sufficient daily budget and then make a daily budget breakdown for them in excel.

And how do you keep track of paid traffic campaigns? Well, this you may get to know in another short blog post of mine sooner or later. :)