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2024 is just around the corner, which means its time to start thinking about how you’re going to promote your brand, attract new traffic to your website, and capture the prospects your business needs. In other words, you need to plan your marketing strategy.
For most companies, this starts with setting an effective marketing budget. Gartner suggests the average marketing budget should be equal to around 9.1% of your company’s revenue. Other experts suggest spending even more. But in a time of economic uncertainty, marketers and business leaders can’t afford to take risks that don’t pay off.
Optimising your marketing results in 2024 means not just setting the right budget, but learning how to maximise your return on investment – doing more with less.
Both marketers and business owners face a number of challenges heading into 2024. Growing economic uncertainty is draining business resources, along with rising inflation and margin threats. At the same time, changing customer journeys means businesses need to invest in endless new ways to reach their audience, through multiple stages in the buyer journey.
So, how do you ensure your marketing budget is primed to deliver results?
Gut instinct will only take you so far, particularly when you’re trying to keep costs low, and returns on investment high. Before allocating your budget, it’s important to conduct a thorough review of your activities over the last year, and the results they’ve generated.
Dive into the data to understand what works and what doesn’t for your business. For instance, how many customers did your influencer collaborations deliver to your business? What was their average order value or customer lifetime value?
How many of your customers come to you from each social media channel they use, and what’s their impact on your bottom line? The majority of your budget should go towards activities that are generating real, measurable results for your business.
Next, establish clear objectives for what you want to accomplish in 2024. The aim of excellent marketing isn’t always to simply “attract more leads” to your business. Sometimes, your focus will be on raising awareness of a specific product or targeting more customers in a certain segment.
Alternatively, you might want to concentrate on increasing customer retention. This is likely to be particularly important in 2024, with marketing budgets dwindling, as converting an existing customer is often cheaper, and easier than converting a new lead.
As well as setting overarching goals, it’s worth establishing specific marketing and sales objectives, with specific metrics and benchmarks for your teams to aim for. Implement monitoring tools that can help you to track the results of your efforts over time.
The evolving digital world means companies now have various channels they can use to connect with their audience. Depending on your marketing budget, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to use every channel in your roster, so it’s important to be proactive about making the right choices.
Scrutinise the performance of your various marketing channels (paid, shared, and owned options), and allocate your budget based on the channel’s alignment with your goals. If you’re not sure whether you should expand into new avenues, consider conducting a competitor analysis.
This can give you an insight into the channels your competitors are using that you may still be absent from, such as new social media platforms.
Excellent marketing demands the support of a skilled marketing team. Unfortunately, 84% of hiring managers are finding it difficult to find the talent they need. If you have “skill gaps” in your business for things like AI marketing, or social media campaigns, you have a few options.
One option could be to invest in retraining and upskilling your existing employees with development programs and courses. Another might be to consider outsourcing some of your marketing needs to agencies, contractors, or freelancers.
Make sure there’s room in your budget for talent, or you could risk a much lower return on investment from your marketing campaigns.
When your marketing budget is limited, it’s often tempting to stick exclusively with what you know. However, failure to experiment and adapt could mean you fall behind your competitors. First, make sure you’re staying up to date on industry trends and innovations that can impact your marketing strategy. Tools like generative AI and automation are becoming extremely valuable.
Some studies suggest that AI can reduce digital marketing costs by around 50%, making it easier to access insights, create campaigns, and scale content. If your competitors are already investing in innovative tools, you might need to consider doing so to stay ahead of the game.
Allocating a portion of your budget to experimentation can give you a crucial competitive edge, and ensure you don’t stagnate in a changing market.
Although paid advertising strategies still have potential, it’s important to acknowledge that their value may dwindle in 2024. Studies show digital ad spending budgets have decreased over the last several years, as companies adapt to things like the impending cookie-less future, and increasing costs for paid ad placements. If you want to maximise your 2024 marketing budget, it might be time to take a more organic approach.
Unlike paid advertising, which stops delivering results when you stop spending, organic strategies can continue to provide value for years to come. An organic marketing strategy can be a cost-effective way to build your company’s visibility and engage with customers throughout the purchasing cycle.
Plus, it helps to strengthen trust in your brand. 51% of customers say they’re more likely to trust brands that appear at the top of the search engine result pages.
Finally, maximising your marketing strategy in 2024 means understanding the connection between the various customer-facing teams in your business, and your overall go-to-market strategy. Aligning your sales, marketing, and customer service teams is one of the best ways to increase your ROI.
When these professionals are aligned, your marketing teams can collect insights from sales and customer support experts to guide their strategies. Additionally, sales teams can learn more from marketing teams about how to increase conversions. Even your customer support experts can use the insights available to create more compelling self-help resources and onboarding strategies.
Aligning your teams ensures you can synergise your entire business around a customer-focused strategy that helps you target the right leads, increase conversions, and boost audience loyalty and retention.
In today’s complex economic environment, it’s more important than ever for businesses to make sure they’re getting the most out of their marketing efforts. The strategies above will ensure you’re investing your resources into efforts that generate real opportunities and returns for your brand.
Just remember, as the landscape continues to evolve, you’ll also need to be prepared to make changes to your marketing budget and strategy over time, based on the data you collect. Don’t wait until the end of the year to assess if your marketing budget is working. Keep a close eye on the metrics, and stay agile.
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