What to budget for marketing and public relations in the new financial year forecast

Most companies and organisations already have an established marketing budget, but when this cost centre can incorporate a good 20 or 30 different marketing and public relations tactics, then it’s important to start allocating your funds accordingly so you maximise your spend and get the best ROI.

With the new financial year fast approaching, now is the time many organisations are reviewing their current FY and projecting the next. Before you tackle the marketing budget, take a look at this list of just some of the things to consider….

Marketing tactics

Out of home advertising
Print and digital advertising
Platforms including HubSpot and other CRMs, funnels, chat bots, email automation
Social media advertising
Social media content marketing
Blogs
Newsletters
E-Books
Copywriting
Video
SEO / SEM
Design and printing of collateral (flyers, banners, coupons etc)
Merchandising
Media relations
Events
Sponsorships
Ambassadors and Influencers
Website
Direct Mail

You can see here that your overall marketing budget spreads very thin, very quickly. As a full-service communications agency, it’s our job to help clients allocate available funds appropriately based on overall commercial goals and objectives.

Creating your marketing budget

How much do you put aside for your marketing? For some businesses, marketing is revered and given significant attention in the budget, as these senior leadership teams understand that it takes consistent exposure to not only attract, but retain, customer attention. For others we come across, it’s obvious that marketing is a dirty word, believing the quality of the product or history of the brand should sell itself, or that there are far more important ventures to allocate the funds to. The thing is, they tell us this sitting in our board room knowing something needs to change.

And that’s what we do for clients. We show them the value of marketing and PR, and how these feed into the overall business goals for growth.

Industry standards suggest allocating anywhere between nine and 12 percent of the overall budget to marketing. But as you can see from the list above, there are still so many decisions to make to ensure you are getting the best bang for your buck.

Where to start planning a marketing and PR budget

It starts with a strategy! A strategy ensures you look at each of the tactics listed above and decide how significant it is in achieving your goals and objectives. For example, events might sound like a great way to meet people and physically put your product in people’s hands, but if you know your audience is too busy to attend events at a certain time or are at the events themselves to sell their own products (in the case of b2b), then that $5000 or $10000 could be better spent in targeted social media advertising or building thought leadership, lead generation and SEO through blogging and e-books.

Our Elevate team has written over 100 strategies over the past two years (almost one every week!) to help businesses like yours move forward with a comprehensive plan. We create these so that you can implement it yourself, or we can take on the leg work for you – our agency status often gets us industry advertising rates unavailable to the public, and media opportunities off the back of relationships we’ve built, so there’s even more cost savings and opportunities by outsourcing.

If you have current surplus budget remaining, one of the best ways you can spend it is to get yourself a strategy in this financial year, to set you up for a thriving FY 2019-20. Contact the Elevate team via email, or phone me personally for a confidential discussion on 0418 814 782.