The “build it and they will come” days are long gone. The battle for the clients’ attention span is so fierce that nowadays you need some serious weapons to win this war. Creativity, persistence, and budget are all necessary to make your brand known and loved. Crafting a budget is not only desirable but absolutely essential for those hoping to get their product off the ground and stay on track with expenses.

Here are 5 easy steps to take you from idea to sales while thinking strategically.

Goal Setting

Think about what you can invest in marketing and write down some things you hope to achieve, just be sure to create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bounded). Every action you take and for which you pay needs to be linked to a specific outcome you hope to achieve.

Start with the end in mind and work your way towards the daily tasks you have to perform. For example, don’t just get a TV commercial in prime time or a weekly blog just because you think that’s what brands do. Think about your target audience and brainstorm the best way to reach them in their natural environment.

Create SMART goals for each step of the sales funnel, from awareness to action. Distribute the marketing budget accordingly. Don’t be afraid to measure the results and adjust the percentages.

Budget Drafting

The biggest mistake we see in marketing is not knowing your budget. Phrases like “I am not sure what my budget is”, “We’ll figure it as we go” or “Nothing, I hope you will do this for free, it’s not a big deal” will scare away any professional marketing agency. Working with people who accept such uncertainty or don’t value their work enough to charge for it can only lead to sub-par results.

If your budget is low, you’ll have to rely on creativity to generate organic sharing. It’s common for start-ups to do a part of their own marketing in the beginning and invest up to 25% of their time in acquiring clients. Never be cheap with your marketing, especially in the beginning. Digital banking solutions like Crediful can offer you access to cheap loans just to get your company started. If you plan well, this will be money which may bring you a return on your investment up to 7-8 times.

Even if you go just for an online-only strategy which is cheaper, it is still important to think about the costs of a great website, social media strategy and content marketing plan (a blog/ whitepaper). Once you have these in place, you can try some offline networking events. Be sure to put in the plan not only the creation costs but also the marketing implementation expenses, like hiring a marketing intern or paying a company.

Planning

This is the moment when you put everything neatly in an excel sheet. Start with your purpose on the first line. Then, set your strategic goals underneath and split them into objectives with associated metrics. Take each target separately and think about tasks to achieve it. Associate the expected costs for each job.

This approach prevents the undesirable situation of just putting any money left from other departments towards marketing and just picking a few random promotional strategies, without a clear plan behind them.

Testing

In marketing, there are no exact recipes for success, many times the process involves trial and error. You need to experiment and see what generates qualified leads and paying customers. You need to know which are the triggers that make your followers turn into customers. Once you have this information, it becomes more comfortable since you only replicate the process.

Testing doesn’t need to be expensive, you just need to play around and record results. For example, create 3-4 variants for the same Facebook ad and promote them for three days to the same target market with a low budget. At the end of that period invest the budget in the best performing one.  You can do something similar with Google Adwords which allows you to break down your budget for test purposes.  Always compare the dollar invested to the dollar earned

Go further

Having a fluid acceptance of your marketing budget is important. This is by no means a fixed cost. The amount you spend on branding, promotions, or other ways of marketing should vary according to the life-stage of each product.

A common mistake most companies make is to diminish marketing budgets for a product which is starting to take off. In fact, it should be the other way around. As soon as you see results, you should increase the efforts until the product reaches a plateau phase.