Is this your fiscal year-end? Are you dreading the annual justification fest? We feel your pain. That’s why, in our webinar, Guide to Maximizing Digital Marketing Budgets with Will Goldfarb, we put together a presentation that hopefully will give you a few tools to capture the most budget and make you look like a marketing super hero.
This virtual workshop walks through storytelling tactics, the use of trends to display needs, and presentation strategies for your budget review. In this recap, I’ve put together an overview about what was covered. In the past, budgets have been created looking purely at last year’s spending. It is time to change it up! We have provided images to help you craft a well thought out plan, using trends, for your next budget review.
Where to Invest
Paid Search
Mobile is increasing at a tremendous rate, invest in your mobile spending for paid search. CPCs have finally reached critical mass. They were declining, but are back on the rise in the past quarter. Thus, organizations will need a bigger budget just to remain at their current level. YoY growth by device demonstrates that mobile is up in ad spend, clicks, and CPC. There are also changes to keep in mind that should be accounted for. A budget is needed for broader keywords, a focus on quality, better mobile experiences, any opportunity to segment audiences should be taken. A budget review is a great time to diversify investments.
Programmatic Advertising
The trends in programmatic show an increase in mobile as well. Mobile ads dominate the space. However, it is difficult to measure credit and attribution. Organizations are concerned about brand safety with programmatic. Know the concerns beforehand so you are prepared when defending your budget.
SEO
There has been YoY growth in organic search visits on mobile more than other devices. As we can see, mobile is up in all areas. The ROI from SEO compounds over time. Investing as early on as you can will pay off. Organic search is going down compared to paid ads, but SEO shows up in other channels and impacts them. It is the foundation for paid search. SEO has the top ROI from all channels. SEO can make or break an organization’s digital marketing strategy when not implemented to its full abilities.
Social Media Ads
Paid social investments are expanding. Social media is used by a massive portion of the population. Average daily time spent on social media continues to grow. Younger generations spend large amounts of time on social media. Why not take advantage of this opportunity? Of course, mobile is a big deal for social as well. Most social media usage is done on a mobile device.
Building Your Budget
It used to be that you would craft a budget by looking at last year, adjusting the budget based on the percent of growth needed, then making a channel for media plans. In this webinar, we proposed a different strategy.
- Define the goal
- Determine the audience
- Research the best place to find the audience
- Present the data
- Look at last year and make changes to channels based on goals
- Adjust budget based on percent of growth need
- Finalize media channel media plans
Resources
Here are the images we used in our webinar that might be helpful to you when you’re building your digital marketing presentations.
Additional Research
Are the stats Will showed you not hitting the mark? No problem, here are a list of reputable resources you can pull your stats from to tell your best budget story:
Merkle Quarterly Reports & Annual Reports
