A resource map is a clear layout of all of the resources that you will require and that they will be required for. And the reason why we do this is so we can create a holistic understanding of the various costs that will be associated with the development of the campaign. It also helps us to allocate financial resources in a much more robust way. The final thing that it does, is it also enables us to not waste team time and effort. So creating efficiencies is critical. When planning ahead of time, this resource map will save you a lot in budget afterward.
Defining the budget
When defining a budget, what are the key considerations we need to take in this process?
- Tools: Tools are the key things that you would require to be able to bring everything else together.
- Creative costs: These are the production costs. Depending on the level of expertise and quality of production that you require will clearly have an impact on the type of budget that you need.
- Media costs: That’s the distribution capability and costs that are required to be able to make sure that your customers or the target audience actually gets access to and views the creative that you put out there.
- Human resources: All of this needs a variety of human interactions to be able to bring this together in a robust way.
That’s perhaps a bit generic from a budgeting perspective. What are some of the key things that you need to think about specifically for digital?
- Investment: The level of investment that you have in digital media is critical.
- Mix: You need to determine the mix of digital media.
When defining your budgeting process, make sure that you robustly determine the level of investments and how you’re going to invest across your various digital assets as well.
Breaking down the budget
The budget can be broken down into different levels.
Strategic
Budgets are broken down straight from a high-level strategic point of view, which is clearly done within perhaps an annual budgeting cycle. This is done through our many organizations, where in essence they know at a high level what is the marketing budget for the following year.
Business
The second thing then becomes a quarterly planning process, which is largely business driven. Think about heads of marketing trying to determine exactly what they want to spend their money on, perhaps what type of media resources, perhaps it’s all about trying to understand what the big campaigns could be from a quarterly perspective.
Operational
And then finally, you have more operational decisions, which are either done say on a monthly basis or actually even on a daily basis. So, for example, you’ll get marketing managers to understand exactly how they need to tweak their budgets from month to month to be able to optimize the actual campaign that they’re trying to drive. When thinking about budgeting, you need to do it across these three key spectrums.
Optimizing the budget
You can use data and analytics to help you optimize the budget.
You can aim to optimize the following:
- Payback: You can determine the overall communication effectiveness or payback, often referred to as ROI. It’s important to understand how the campaign is performing for you. If you set out those key KPIs at the outset of the process, you can then benchmark and measure the overall communication perspective.
- Comparative campaign effects: This is trying to benchmark your campaign versus other ones that have either been done by yourself or perhaps the results of competitor campaigns or related campaigns. This gives you a sense of benchmarking.
- Efficiency: Optimizing efficiency enables you to determine how best to, or how cost-effectively, you can do a certain key activity. This can involve frugal innovation and agile movement, where you aim to do things in a short sharp fire way which enables you to gain maximum efficiencies across the marketing campaign.
- Cross-brand effects: How can you optimize the partnership approaches that you may have with different brands and gain synergies from those different brands? Or another you’re thinking about it is leaning on those brands as a way to gain incremental value for your marketing campaign. Being able to partner with different brands is a great way to be able to gain incremental value and use their media space as a means to create greater efficiencies across the entire network.
Budget for digital integration
When it comes to budgeting for digital integration, you need to consider the following:
- Exploit existing resources: Ensure you have a clear understanding of exactly what resources you have available to you at this point in time. Make sure you use full use of them. A nice framework to use in this area to identify with existing resources that you have is to think about owned media, bought media, and earned media. You’ll be able to quite rapidly identify the various channels that you have under each of those sections and then make sure you are utilizing them.
- Maximize your ROI from existing investments: Use your digital auditing process exactly what investments you’ve currently made. Usually, you have a variety of digital tools that are already in the marketplace. Social pages, bought or earned media assets, your website, and so on can all be used to maximum effect.
- Experiment with creativity and media: Using A/B testing is a great methodology to use. You put a variety of different creatives into the marketplace using what’s called a champion-challenger approach. You can compare the performance of those different creatives which then enables you to determine which one is the one that is the champion.
- Trial paid-for solutions: One of the major advantages of digital in today’s landscape is the freemium model. The freemium model allows you to trial a variety of products and services, largely either free or in a very cost-effective way. And then in essence, when you know something is working and when you are looking to ramp up, that’s when the model starts to become more of a paid-for type of structure. For example, in the email marketing type of world using MailChimp at the outset of a campaign enables you to deliver campaigns literally free of cost to begin with, and then as your volumes increase you need to pay more for those services.
- Invest: Continually invest in a variety of different assets and techniques. It’s important that you don’t see your digital integration as a static type of approach, but actually, a way more comprehensive one where you’re constantly investing in new assets.
Creative media ratio
You need to determine the optimal ratio between the creative budget relative to the media budget. This is the creative media ratio. It is simply the level of budget you attribute to creative versus your media spent. It can help you maximize the support you can offer each activity and a lot of the time ensuring you’re not only investing in creative work that won’t receive enough paid through support or paid support.
If you’re building a creative, you need to make sure you maximize the reach. Monitoring your creative media ratio enables you to determine if you’re spending way too much or too little on creative or media. Typically speaking, there is no right formula for what that ratio should look like. Traditional marketing functions have tended to go for an 80:20 split between creative and media. However, when you think about the digital disruption that’s currently taking place, that ratio may well be a bit imbalanced in today’s context.
Top Digital Marketing Tools & Why We Love Them
The digital marketing industry is constantly changing, and if you feel like you’re being challenged to do more with less, you’re not alone.
Marketers need tools more than ever to automate repetitive tasks, augment our skills, collaborate more effectively, and scale what we’re doing right.
And when it comes to digital marketing tools, you have tens or even hundreds of thousands of options to choose from – certainly hundreds of options for each channel or task type.
- Canva
Steve Jobs once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Canva makes creating design elements simple with a sophisticated platform.
If you can not draw a stick figure, don’t worry. The Canva repository of designs allows you to choose and edit a design without specific skills to create a stunning pixel-perfect design.
Additionally, Canva provides graphic animation, infographics, and videos.
Canva offers a free plan, but if you want to upgrade to a paid plan, it is well worth the investment.
- HubSpot
HubSpot provides a powerhouse of tools to help marketers, but Hubspot CRM is particularly popular due to its powerful features.
The HubSpot CRM provides email tracking & notifications, prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, and a live chat option.
Furthermore, HubSpot’s ease of use makes the platform stand out from competitors.
The best part about the HubSpot CRM tool is the price point, which is free.
Unfortunately, the drawback of the free plan is that it only allows two users to access the CRM.
However, the paid plan has unlimited users, and you can add up to one million contacts.
- VWO
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be somewhat esoteric, but it doesn’t have to be with VWO (Visual Web Optimizer).
VWO measures clicks on-site, page scrolling from users, time spent on-site, and exit intent.
The power of VWO is the ability to test different angles for your site to increase your conversion rates.
Testing button colors, headlines, landing page layouts, and several other variables is straightforward with VWO.
You don’t have to be technically inclined to set up tests.
Non-technically inclined individuals without coding skills can set up tests just as easily as a developer.
- Semrush
To drive traffic to your site, you will need competitive intelligence.
Semrush provides 50+ tools to help you compete against your competitors.
Semrush is widely regarded as an SEO tool, but that may be selling it a bit short as the software offers several other digital marketing features.
For instance, Semrush offers features for social media competitive analysis, CRO, PPC spying, and PR monitoring.
If you’re looking for a suite of tools to compete against the onslaught of competitors looking to drive you out of business, Semrush provides a good line of defense.
- Slack
Once upon a time, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, and letters were the norm for communication.
Now, millions of people use Slack as the primary way of communicating.
Slack is the next evolution of communication. Messages are instantaneous, and you can share several file formats through the platform.
Additionally, Slack connects you to video conference calls and allows you to create channels for a select group of contacts for group chatting to increase productivity.
- Asana
The path of least resistance is not always a linear progression.
Asana realized this when they built this fantastic project management software.
Asana provides project managers, product managers, and executives visibility and accountability of team members.
You can break tasks down into subtasks and assign them to team members.
Additionally, you can set up milestones, and the entire organization can view the progression of projects through tagging tasks.
Through API integrations, Asana also integrates with CRM systems and several other third-party apps.
- OptinMonster
OptinMonster, bought to you by veteran WordPress aficionado Syed Balkhi, is sure to delight.
Whether you are a startup, small business, or even an enterprise-level organization with a WordPress site or blog, OptinMonster monster delivers advanced functionality hidden in simplicity to end-users.
OptinMonster provides a highly customizable lightbox popup for collecting emails, countdown timers, inline forms, content locks, and targeted campaigns based on Google Analytics data that seamlessly integrates with the platform.
- ConvertKit
ConvertKit provides advanced multi-step email journeys called sequences to increase your email open rates.
In addition, audience segmentation called rules within the platform offers complex automation for your email sequences which take minutes, not hours, to build with ConvertKit.
Furthermore, all links inserted within your email sequences are tracked and reported within a user-friendly dashboard.
ConvertKit also enables you to copy and paste code within your articles to create beautiful email opt-in forms that can easily integrate with the CRM platform of your choice.
If you are looking for cost-effective, user-friendly email marketing software that provides advanced automation and segmentation with a plethora of API integrations, try ConvertKit.
- Unbounce
Landing pages can make or break the number of transactions you can drive to your organization.
For instance, if you are running PPC campaigns, Google ads assign a landing page quality score that could either help or hurt your efforts to drive sales.
Unbounce provides a cost-effective way to build responsive landing pages optimized for mobile and desktop traffic that happen to be aesthetically pleasing and functional.
No coding is necessary to create landing pages.
The drag-and-drop editor provides you with everything you need to make the experience you would like to create for your target audience.
If you would like to add advanced functionality, you have the option of adding custom HTML and Javascript.
Unbounce offers over 120 integrations with third-party applications.
AI technology called smart traffic can dynamically shift your traffic to the highest converting landing page variant, drastically increasing your conversion rates.
- Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a social media tool that has taken the marketing world by storm since its inception by James Blackwell and Henley Wing.
When you need a tool to get to the heart of social media analytics, look no further.
Identifying social media influencers, building trending journalist profiles, and viewing the most shared content are a few features that Buzzsumo offers that will give you a competitive advantage against your competitors.
