Introduction
Designing and developing a digital marketing strategy for an engineering company can be a daunting task. With so many channels to consider, it’s easy to get lost in all the options. But with the right knowledge, you can create a budget that works for your business goals. This guide will help you understand how to create an effective digital marketing budget for engineering companies in 2023!
Determining Your Digital Marketing Budget
The first step in determining your digital marketing budget is to understand what you’re getting into. The following sections will help break down the process and give you some idea of how much to spend on each channel.
- Determine Your Needs: First, consider what your goals are for your digital marketing campaign and determine how much money it will take to achieve them.
- Determine Your Resources: Next, figure out how much money is available for this project. Look at existing resources (the budget that has been set aside for other projects) and projected income from sales that have been made in the past few months.
- Analyse Your Data: Take a look at which channels have worked well in the past with other businesses in similar industries. So, you can use their data as a benchmark for your own business’s performance metrics over time.
Do a SWOT Analysis
- What is a SWOT analysis?
A SWOT analysis is how you can get a general idea of what you need to do to improve your business. It’s a way of analysing your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The idea behind this type of analysis is that it helps you with future planning by allowing you to identify the resources (strengths) that will be most useful for accomplishing goals (opportunities).
Know Your Customer
- Know your customer’s needs.
- Know your customers’ wants.
- Understand their problems.
- Understand their behaviour.
- Know their preferences, demographics and psychographics
Where Are They in the Buyer’s Journey?
Knowing where your customers are in the buyer’s journey is critical to understanding how much time you have to convert them. The customer journey framework is a helpful way of visualising where users are in the sales process and helps marketers do a better job of creating marketing strategies that align with their current stage.
Here’s what that looks like:
What Digital Tactics Do You Need?
The first step to creating a digital marketing budget is to figure out what tactics you need.
Here are some of the most common digital marketing strategies:
- Social media. Social media is still one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience and build brand awareness. But it doesn’t come cheap. If you have time to spare and want to focus on outreach and engagement with potential clients, this may be a good tactic for you.
However, if your goal is lead generation through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (or any other platform), consider hiring an agency that specialises in social media advertising instead so they can help maximise performance from start-to-finish—which includes optimising posts for conversions as well as branding opportunities! - Content marketing (blogging). While blogging isn’t necessarily a “tactic” of digital marketing strategy; rather it’s part of an overall strategy which includes SEO optimisation (search engine optimisation) and website development/landing pages/CRM systems etc., all aimed at generating leads through content sharing across various social channels like LinkedIn and your website.
Who’s Doing the Work In-House and Who Will Be Outsourced?
Many companies are considering outsourcing their digital marketing to an agency, but before you do that, there are some things to consider.
- How much time will it save? – It depends on the size of your company and what you’re looking for in a digital marketing agency. If you need help with all aspects of digital marketing including content strategy, UX design and development, social media management or even public relations and PR then outsourcing these services may be worth it because sometimes doing all this work yourself can take away from focusing on other important business functions like product development or sales growth.
- What makes sense financially? – You also have to look at how much money you’re willing to spend per month on outsourced services vs how much money would go into hiring full-time employees specifically trained in those areas.
What Are Your Financial Goals And Limitations?
Knowing your financial goals and limitations is the first step towards creating an effective marketing plan. It’s important to be as clear as possible about these things before you start throwing around numbers. First, let’s cover what we mean by “financial goals and limitations”:
- The budget for digital marketing
- The budget for other marketing activities (such as trade shows)
- The overall sales and marketing budget at your engineering company or industrial company
For this section, we’ll assume that you’re a CEO or CMO of an engineering business or industrial manufacturer who wants to make sure their marketing efforts are working well together.
Creating Your Digital Marketing Budget
- Define your goals and objectives before starting.
The first step of creating a digital marketing budget is to define what you want to achieve with it. What do you hope to achieve in the next 3-6 months? Is it growing traffic on your website, gaining new leads, driving sales or increasing brand awareness?
How much do you expect to spend on each channel per month (e.g., £5K for PPC)? Once these questions are answered, it’s time for the technical stuff:
If you have a clear understanding of your digital marketing strategy and what you need, you can create an effective digital marketing budget.
To create a successful digital marketing budget, you need to have an understanding of your goals, your current digital marketing strategy and your desired outcome from working with a digital agency.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, creating your digital marketing budget is an important part of marketing your business. You want to get in front of as many potential customers as possible so that they can see what you have to offer. This can be done by understanding where they are in their buying journey, creating ads that speak directly to them and reaching them through channels like social media or search engines. If you’ve done this work beforehand, then creating an effective budget becomes much easier!
If you’d like to discuss a Digital Marketing Budget Breakdown For Engineering Companies in more detail, call Sarah on 07816071112 or email sarah@aiminternet.co.uk. We’d love to hear from you.
