Digital marketing can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Follow these steps to optimize your organization's budget and get the most bang for your buck.

Whether your business uses traditional means to determine your marketing budget, follows current trends, or has a custom formula based on specific needs, there is a good chance that more of it will be allocated to digital marketing with each passing year. 

In our research into the evolution of marketing, we surveyed over 500 CMOs and learned that 58 percent of them are shifting their budgets from traditional to digital marketing. 

Depending on factors such as business type, size, and industry, the actual monetary amount of your digital marketing budget will vary, but you can learn from tips and techniques to optimize spend. 

In this article, we provide eight useful tips on how to optimize your company's digital marketing budget to get the best value and meet business objectives.

1. Determine What Falls Under the Digital Marketing Umbrella
If you are going to optimize your budget, you need to know which elements are considered 'digital marketing' and which are not. For many companies, if it's online, then it's considered digital marketing, but not every activity or service may fall under the marketing umbrella. 

By deciding what’s included and what’s not, you can focus on the right platforms. Some of the activities to consider include:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Some senior marketers may not consider SEO or organic traffic a marketing activity, but it is a valuable tool when it comes to driving traffic and producing qualified leads. Check out some useful SEO reporting tools and a free checklist. 

Social Media – The people in your target market are likely to use social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and social is becoming a massive source of qualified prospects for many companies. The 
social media marketing courses in Sri Lanka to find out relevant case studies. 

PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising) – This is often thought of as the gold standard when it comes to online marketing since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and you can target based on tight demographics. (Check out this PPC for eCommerce tracker to help with your campaigns)

Email Campaigns (inbound marketing) – A 'pull' rather than 'push' type of strategy, email marketing continues to be a valuable way to market to people online.

Digital Display (banner ads, online video, etc.) – Modern banner ads are non-intrusive and targeted, and video is emerging as the marketing wave of the future.

View the article - Top 3 digital marketing courses in Sri Lanka

Content Creation (website pages and blogs) – It’s easy to neglect content creation when thinking of your marketing budget, but creating great content is a critical part of the overall picture.  

To optimize your budget, the first step is getting to know your customers better and understanding where they spend time online. This way, you can direct your resources to the appropriate places and maximize the return on your spending. The results of this kind of investigation often surprise marketers, as they might have assumptions as to where their ideal customer is active.

For example, if your company puts a lot of the digital marketing budget to leverage the power of LinkedIn, only to learn that most of your customers spend most of their time on Facebook, that's not an efficient use of marketing dollars.

By using analytics (like GA4) and advanced metrics, your marketing team can track where your target audience spends its time, how long they stay, and what causes them to leave. To gather this information it's necessary to create a persona of your ideal customer, so you know what you are looking for.

If you have a budget, then you should also have personas to work with. However, if for some reason that hasn't happened, create detailed personas of your ideal customer or client that include age, gender, job title, income, family life, hobbies, interests, and anything else that's relevant. Here's a buyer persona template to help you. 

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