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The marketing budget makes up one of the most important part of your annual budget, and at times, the most expensive. Year after year, executives plan and budget marketing activities for the fiscal year. Money is spent on trade shows, outbound campaigns, advertising, and more, and at the end of the 12-month session, they are reviewed and if successful repeated for the next year.
This perpetual cycle might seem the best (and perhaps only) way to invest your marketing budget, but it’s not. Making improvements in the system by investing some of your marketing budget for “strategic” purposes will move your company forward.
In The Marketing Budget, How to Invest Strategically, we have outlined 3 expenditures designed to move the company’s marketing along by improving the ability to execute and keep up with trends:
Train your staff. Sometimes it’s hard to find money for training. Not everyone believes it has a positive ROI. However, in the marketing world, things have been changing rapidly, and you and your team need to take on new responsibilities, to understand the latest and greatest marketing techniques and tools. Often, this requires a bit of time and money set aside for training.
Develop great content. Today we live in a “content marketing” world. “In your face” marketing is out, educating the potential customer is in. Quality content is required to make this happen. It’s an investment because good content can be used and reused and help fuel the marketing engine for years. Don’t wait until you need it; create content now that is topical and current.
Invest in marketing tools. The marketing world has been rich with new tools; marketing automation platforms, social media tools and the like give us capabilities and options we never had before. However, these tools not only cost money to acquire, but there is also a learning curve to getting the most out of them. So you’ll not only be investing dollars to get the system, but you’ll also be investing staff time in learning to use the tools. However, once these investments are made, they pay considerable benefits for years into the future.
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