Am I Spending Too Much On Marketing? Am I Not Spending Enough?

Learn How To Allocate Your Marketing Dollars

A marketing budget involves all kinds of marketing avenues

As you work on growing your business, it’s hard to know how much to invest in marketing. Establishing a marketing strategy is a key component when your goal is to maintain your current customers while acquiring new ones. For this perfect storm, there’s somewhat of a sweet spot when it comes to allocating funds. 

A marketing budget involves all kinds of marketing avenues. This includes (but is not limited to) online advertising, social media campaigns, updated web content (such as blogs), e-mail marketing, print flyers, and telephone calls. Even more, you may also consider Google Ads, events, and sponsorships as part of your marketing budget. Regardless, it’s hard to know how much to spend and whether or not you’re spending your marketing money wisely. In this guide, we will discuss why a marketing campaign is important to growing your business, how much you need to budget to meet your marketing goals, and how much of those valuable marketing dollars you should spend.

Why Should I Invest in Marketing in the First Place?

In today’s day and age, if you want to grow your business, you have to invest something in marketing. To be comfortable with what you’re spending, we want you to consider why you’re spending it. Investing the right amount in marketing does more than obtain new customers for your business.

Marketing increases brand awareness. This means that with the right marketing campaign, you reach people that are interested in your products and services. These potential customers associate your brand with their needs. Even if they don’t have a current need, brand awareness will deliver later on.

Marketing helps you meet (and hopefully exceed) customer expectations. Marketing is more than creating advertisements. It’s about educating your customer base and leading them to the information they need to answer their questions and fulfill their needs. By creating updated web content, offering promotional items or advertisements, and communicating via social media, you’re able to connect with your current and potential customers in new and innovative ways. Through these channels, you can communicate who you are and what you want to deliver. Do you offer high-quality services? Do you have accolades worth mentioning? Are you offering free or reduced services? Do you have a promotional deal?

Marketing taps into seasonal trends. Understanding when specific services are needed in your service area will help drive business. Even further, catering your marketing strategies to meet these needs will only enhance sales.

Marketing enhances your reputation. Positive reputations are built over time. They grow from fair practices, a solid moral compass, and a relatable team of people who work with your customers. Furthermore, a favorable reputation only enhances positive brand awareness. Are you family-owned and operated? Do you offer reduced-price services to veterans? Do you have recurring plans that help families save money? Are you on time? Do you follow up with customers? Do you guarantee your services? If people have a positive perspective about who you are, what you offer, and how you deliver services, they will recommend you to others.

The right marketing campaign will help you reach and even exceed your marketing goals. If your goals are all about making more money, brand awareness, exceeding customer expectations, understanding seasonal trends, and developing a positive reputation will help you get where you want to be.

How Much Should I Invest in My Marketing Strategy?

Now that we’ve discussed the why, it’s important to think about the how:

• How much should I invest?

• How should I spend my money?

• How will I know it's working?

When it comes to spending your hard-earned money on a marketing strategy, it makes sense that you’re reluctant. Fortunately, there are some formulas that will help you determine how much you need to spend.

Realizing how much you need to spend on your marketing campaign starts with establishing a goal. How much do you want to grow? Every business is different and will thus have different goals. If you’re just starting out, you may decide to spend a little bit more, whereas if you’re well established and looking to retain your current clients, you may choose to spend a little bit less. On the flip side, if you’re well established and have money to spend, you will likely be more willing to take a risk that involves expanding customers or services. Part of establishing a goal means revisiting, revising, and rewriting your goals as your company grows and as people’s needs change. 

So, how much should you specifically spend? Fortunately, there’s a formula. The United States Small Business Administration recommends that the average business looking to grow spend a minimum of seven to eight percent of your gross revenue on your marketing budget, and our experts at FieldRoutes™ agree. If you spend less than that on your gross revenue, you can’t count on growing. Some businesses spend more, a lot more, especially if they’re looking to grow faster or promote new products. The entrepreneurial challenge is trying to run a business while staying in touch with marketing trends, developing creative marketing strategies, and thinking about how those marketing strategies will help you meet your growth goals.

Visit fieldroutes.com/solutions/sales-and-marketing to access the FieldRoutes marketing budget calculator. It assesses your revenue against your growth goals to help determine the right spend for your business.

All of these hypotheticals feel paralyzing when you think about the amount of work that goes into creating these campaigns and determining what’s working well and what’s falling short. In the end, most companies wind up consulting a professional whose job is to look at marketing trends and allocate funds accordingly. In the end, it’s all about collecting data on your marketing experience to figure out what works best. Doing exactly what other companies are doing, on average, may not always prove successful for you and your goals. It sets a nice foundation, but you must decide how exactly you’re going to build your castle.

Set Goals: 

We discussed this earlier, but it’s worth mentioning again. What are your specific goals, and how can you allocate funds to reach those goals? Answer these questions: 

• Are you looking for recurring clients? 

• Are you trying to recruit new clients? 

• Are you trying to outcompete a bigger company? 

• Are you pushing an incentive?

Think About Your Return on Investment (ROI): 

If you track and optimize for return on investment, you can understand how much you’re spending on each marketing channel. You can determine the value of this cost by comparing it to how effective a specific strategy may be. This will help inform your marketing decisions. Some marketing strategies are easier to collect data on than others. For instance, it’s easy to understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign, but something that’s more abstract, like branding, is harder to track. Regardless, tracking and optimizing for ROI is an excellent starting point.

Be Flexible: 

When establishing your marketing budget, give yourself some wiggle room. As you become more familiar with what’s working well, you may want to invest more in a specific avenue. Change is inevitable in the marketing world, and you want to be able to capitalize on unexpected opportunities.

When running a business, adding an effective marketing campaign feels like a lot. Furthermore, to allocate your marketing budget well, you have to collect data and then calibrate your spending to changing trends, what’s working well, and what’s falling short, which takes time, experience, and drive.

FieldRoutes Can Help You Put It All Together

Fortunately, the experts at FieldRoutes can help you determine your growth goals, calculate your marketing budget, develop a marketing strategy, and provide the data that shows how well that strategy is working. 

Not only do we collect data, but our marketing portal will help you navigate through a sea of data to clearly show you how well our marketing strategy is working. The FieldRoutes™ sales and marketing suite integrates seamlessly with the FieldRoutes™ operations suite, allowing you to see which marketing channels are generating the most revenue and which are falling short. Our team continuously looks at this data and recalibrates your marketing strategy so that you make the most out of your marketing dollars. By consolidating all of this data and showing a single view of your marketing efforts, you will have a clear guide to make all of your business decisions. Even further, by collecting data, you will begin to hone in on how much it costs to acquire a new customer to help you inform future decisions about how you plan to grow your business and spend your marketing dollars. 

Reach out to us today to learn more about how FieldRoutes sales and marketing can help you wisely spend your marketing dollars. Our team works closely with you and your goals to ensure that we represent your company and your values. We know the field service industry, and we are here to help you succeed.

Works Cited

Olenski, Steve. (2015, December). “A Practical Guide to Determining your Perfect Marketing Budget”. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes. com/sites/steveolenski/2015/12/21/a-practical-guide-to-determiningyour-perfect-marketing-budget/?sh=8ac0f9360d8c 

Schwinum, Henning. (2021, January). “The Start-Up Dilemma – How Much to Spend on Sales & Marketing”. Ven:dux. Retrieved from https://www. vendux.org/blog/the-start-up-dilemma-how-much-to-spend-on-salesand-marketing 

Wilson, Amelia. (2020, January 3). “How to Use Header Tags: SEO Best Practices”. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from https://www. searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/header-tags/#close

Your Partner in Growth

We hope this guide has been helpful. Whether you’re looking to add efficiencies, make things easier for your employees, improve your customer experience, increase sales, or anything in between, FieldRoutes™ is committed to helping your business reach its full potential. 

The platform automates all aspects of field service operations for enterprise and small business customers that span office management, advanced route optimization, payment processing, digital sales, marketing, and customer acquisition solutions that accelerate growth, streamline operations, increase customer retention, and maximize revenue. Our operations and sales and marketing suites were built with your customers and employees in mind and can help you grow quickly, scale intelligently, and serve customers relentlessly.

Call for a Demo at 207.492.4235

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