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Strategy

Create a dedicated, uninterrupted marketing budget.

Why it matters

Everyone has heard the old adage ‘gotta spend money to make money’ right? One of the most common problems we see printing businesses making is not creating a dedicated marketing budget.Without a budget you can’t leverage paid marketing opportunities. These paid opportunities are often provide the best return on marketing dollars. For example, pay-per-click Internet marketing is considered to be one of the most effective paid marketing effort since it is so easy to target and measure results.

How to establish a marketing budget

There are many financial modeling methods to determine a marketing budget. Most of these are overly complex. The simplest of them all is the ‘percent of sales method’. This method allocates a certain percentage of your sales to marketing budget. If you are a start up printing business and have no sales data you can use your projected sales as a basis to get started.

Marketing Budget Do’s & Dont’s

Do’s

  • Commit to 12 months of consistent, uninterrupted allocation and spending of your marketing budge
  • Consider hiring a professional marketing agency to consult you. Investing with a professional will help you maximize your results and will delegate the efforts so they don’t go missed
  • Measure the results and make tweaks. Constantly monitor your marketing effort performance and adjustments from your learning.

Don’ts

  • Never use your marketing budget as a rainy day fund. It has been allocated to marketing and can’t be used for any other purpose.
  • Don’t stop funding your marketing budget if sales decline. This is the benefit of a percentage to sales method.
  • Don’t forget that marketing dollars spend will produce more sales through exposure, new leads and long-term customers. Whenever you get anxious about marketing expenditures remember: Marketing makes you money.

Takeaway

Committing to a dedicated marketing budget will ensure that you are continuously generating awareness, interest, new leads, and keeping your sales funnel full.