Think of your B2B marketing budget as a pie. Everyone wants a bigger slice. But this isn’t a family dinner and it isn’t your job to make everyone happy. Your job is to make sure your marketing efforts are effective and impactful. So, how should you slice up your B2B marketing budget for maximum ROI? And how big of a slice is enough to get the results you need? Before we get into the nitty-gritty of budget allocation, let’s take a look at how to make the most of every marketing dollar.
Putting Every Penny to Good Use
Traditional wisdom holds that the ideal B2B marketing spend should be 10% of your revenue. Newer companies and start-ups trying to scale fast are typically advised to spend between 12–20% of their overall gross revenue on marketing. While established B2B marketing companies looking to increase profitability are told between 8–12% is just fine.
Alongside an increase in marketing spend, we’re also seeing a serious shift in the allocation of marketing dollars. Traditional channels of marketing are rapidly losing ground to B2B digital marketing with print advertising, cold-calling, and direct mail losing out to content marketing, social media, and email. This change has revealed some very obvious winners and losers, with content marketing as the main benefactor of this shift in allocation.
B2B Marketing Budget Breakdown for 2022 & Beyond
Now, before you begin to gleefully slash off your traditional marketing budget, remember to make informed, insight-driven decisions for allocating your marketing spend. The way forward is to start with the end. It sounds obvious, but how you spend your B2B marketing budget and what you spend it on should align with what you’re trying to accomplish. Once, you have clarity on your company goals, determine the right way to achieve them.
Here’s a sample budget breakdown that you can swear by in the coming years:
1. Campaign Planning and Content Creation: 40-50%
Whatever your B2B marketing campaign objectives are, it’s likely that content will serve as the meat of them. Digital content such as blogs, social media posts, videos, e-books, infographics, etc. all play a role in evolving a brand story that cements your position in the market and makes your prospects want to interact with your firm. It is the first step in the buyer journey to satisfied customers. In addition to creating a scalable content creation process, you may need to seek out the services of a seasoned B2B marketing company, if your marketing collateral needs exceed your team’s capacity.
2. Paid Advertising: 20-30%
While much of B2B digital marketing content depends on organic reach—paid advertising gives enterprises a leg up in the market. It is critical for brands that want to establish a market presence or enter an entirely new segment of the B2B marketplace. Paid advertising provides some of the most direct and immediate measures of ROI available. In fact, you can count dollar-for-dollar exactly which ad campaign brought in a certain number of conversions or a certain amount of revenue.
3. Workforce Marketing 10%
Your employees are an extremely powerful part of your marketing arm. A workforce marketing program aligns every member of your team behind company goals through increased education and advocacy-strengthening efforts. This might include internal meetings, sales events, and marketing collaterals that “sell” employees on your company culture and goals. While these things don’t come free, they’re well worth the investment as you build up employee knowledge, motivation, and morale.
4. Tools & Automation 10%
Marketing automation platforms and services streamline manual, repetitive tasks, saving you precious time, money, and human resources, allowing you to analyze and refine your marketing activities in much more intuitive ways. It delivers clear ROI projections to determine the success of your past and present campaigns. B2B marketing metrics are an absolute necessity and requires a robust tech stack—for the insights to be real-time and actionable.
5. Events 5-10%
A corporate presence at prestigious industry events or your own company’s events can quickly deepen your market presence, showing prospects that you’re a real-world company with a unique identity. Events, be it exhibitions, tradeshows, conventions, conferences, or roadshows, are prime opportunities to showcase prospects and customers, in a personal setting, why you and your solutions matter. Event costs can include registration fees, travel expenses, and other collaterals. Hosting your own event includes the former, plus venue rentals, catering, promotions, and other miscellaneous operating fees.
Last Words
In the thick of assessing B2B lead generation needs and trying to implement new campaigns, you often can’t see the forest for the trees. But with a well-planned budget that breaks down each activity with clear expectations of the investment you’re putting in and the value you’re getting out, you’ll be able to relax and focus on each marketing task, with the comfort of knowing that you’re building a strong foundation for your organisation’s continued growth. If you are still not sure to decide your B2B marketing platforms and budget then our experts at Oxper MarTech can help you. Contact us now to book your free consultation.
