Make the Most of Your Client’s Marketing Budget

When you allocate your marketing budget, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of every dollar. This is true when it’s your own marketing budget, but even more so when you’re spending someone else’s money.

Clients want to know that their budget is safe in your hands and that letting you manage it will lead to profitable returns. This means that when you’re allocating your client’s marketing budget, you need to ensure every decision is based on data and sound judgment to minimize the risks of letting your client down.

Sounds like a lot of pressure? Well, it is! But if you follow these steps, you’re sure to maximize your client’s marketing budget and make them thankful they handed marketing off to you.

How to set a marketing budget

Before you can optimize a marketing budget, you need to know what you’re working with. This means setting a budget. But first, let’s talk about what a marketing budget actually is.

We all know the old adage, “you have to spend money to make money”, right? Well, this is the core of what a marketing budget is about: spending money to bring new customers to your business.

Your marketing budget might include:

• Paid advertising
• Content development
• Sponsored web content
• PPC campaigns
• Marketing staff
• Website domain and maintenance
• Automation software or other marketing tools

The expense of these items can really add up, so you need to think about how much your clients are willing and able to spend on marketing. A 2021 CMO survey showed that on average, marketing accounts for 11.8% of a company’s total budget. Of course, this varies widely depending on several factors including industry, company size, revenue, company age, whether it sells a product or a service, and whether it’s B2C or B2B.

For example, consumer goods companies tend to spend on average 24.4% of their budgets on marketing, while healthcare companies on average spend just 4.5%. Companies with fewer employees and less revenue also tend to allocate more money toward marketing.

Because it varies so widely, it’s impossible to say exactly what percentage of your client’s overall budget should go to marketing. Each company will need to determine its marketing goals and how much it can responsibly spend to reach those goals. Remember marketing isn’t just a cost, it’s an investment!

Whatever your client’s budget is, they’re sure to see it back with a sound ROI if it’s spent correctly.

Allocating a marketing budget

Now that you have a number, it’s time to slice up the pie. Unlike a pizza, you don’t need to slice it evenly. Rather, you need to determine which parts of your marketing activities may need a bigger budget and which can do with less. Follow these steps for marketing budget allocation best practices.

Collect data for decision-making

Your client trusted you with their marketing budget. To show them they did the right thing, you need to have all the data to back up any decision you make. You’ll first want to analyze your client’s previous marketing spend and results.

For example, look at their website’s metrics.

• How many website visitors are they getting per month?
• What are the average page views?
• Are your client’s metrics similar to their competitors’ metrics?
• Did they invest in PPC campaigns or other paid advertising activities?
• What was their ROI?
• Were previous advertising initiatives profitable?

Pro Tip: Use the Similarweb Company Analysis Tool to get these metrics and compare your client’s site to competitors’ sites.

All of this data will help you determine where to focus your client’s marketing budget and give you a benchmark to determine the success of your marketing efforts.

Set your goals

Why did your client hire you? They obviously believe your agency can do something that they can’t. Are they looking to improve sales? Grow brand awareness? Reduce their customer-acquisition costs? Whatever it is, it’s important to ensure that you and your client are on the same page. The goals will determine which channels and strategies your agency should focus on.

Goals must be set smartly. When you work with your client to determine the goals, make sure they are:

• Specific: If your goal is to improve marketing, you’ll have no way to know if you did this. You need to set specific goals so that you know what to work towards. For example, increasing website traffic or winning more PPC keyword auctions.
• Measurable: How will you know if you reached the goal? Goals must be measurable so you can track progress and know what success means. For example, increasing website traffic by 20% or generating 30 qualified leads.
• Realistic: What if your goal is to be the #1 eCommerce retailer? It’s a nice dream, but for most companies, it’s not a reality. Goals must be reasonably attainable based on the marketing budget and industry.
• Timely: Each goal should have a timeline. Will it take a quarter? A year? This is important for setting expectations and ensuring you’re on track to reach the goal.

Create a plan

If the goals are your destination, you need a roadmap to reach them. What must be done in order to achieve your goals?

For example, let’s say one of your client’s goals is to generate 30 qualified leads from their website per quarter. You need to determine which strategies will bring in qualified leads. This could include investing in an SEO strategy and optimizing website content for organic search results, as well as developing a new PPC campaign strategy focused on long-tail keywords. You might also invest in retargeting qualified leads.

If the goal is to bring more traffic to your client’s website, you might focus on placing sponsored content on quality channels that could funnel in website visitors.

Pro Tip: Use Similarweb Media Analytics to identify top publishers in your client’s industry and choose the right platforms to advertise on.

Your plan should include all the tactics you’ll use to reach your goal. This means using proven strategies that you know will work, as well as experimenting with new marketing tactics that could bring big results.

For example, Coca-Cola follows the 70-20-10 marketing rule. This means that 70% of the budget and efforts go to its bread-and-butter of marketing, meaning activities the brand knows will work. 20% goes to trying to innovate these activities. This could include trying something new with a specific target audience or tweaking a marketing message. Finally, 10% of the budget and efforts go to high-risk, high-reward activities. This could mean opening up a new channel, establishing a new partnership, or creating some provocative advertising. If these efforts work, they could set your client way ahead of the competition.

Calculate cost and expected ROI

The plan sounds great, but is it feasible? You’ll need to calculate all the expenses to ensure it fits in your budget. This includes analyzing which tools you’ll need, how much time your agency will need to invest, and of course some wiggle room in case some of your more experimental marketing strategies don’t pay off. You also need to know what the return on investment will be, meaning what your client should expect to gain from the marketing activities.

You’ll want to estimate optimal, realistic, and conservative scenarios to ensure that even in the worst-case scenario, you won’t be losing money for your client. You can base your calculations on industry benchmarks and your agency’s experience.

Pro Tip: Use Similarweb Identify Industry Trends Tool to determine industry benchmarks and learn what is realistic for your client.

Allocate spending

Now, for the moment we’ve all been waiting for: It’s time to slice the pie! You know what activities you want to engage in and what they’ll cost, so now you can decide how much of the budget will go to each activity. If website traffic is a priority, you might allocate more toward a robust media plan. If you want to try to reduce your keyword bids on PPC campaigns, you might want to allocate some of the budget to experimenting with different keyword strategies.

For example, let’s say your client’s budget is $10,000. You might allocate it as follows:

Pro Tip: If your budget includes investing in PPC Campaigns, you get a good idea of how much money you’ll need based on what competitors are spending. Use Similarweb PPC Spend Feature in the Keyword Research Tool to analyze your client’s competitors’ PPC budgets.

Track and refine

As soon as any activity begins, you need to start tracking it. This includes tracking the spending, progress, and results. You might want to watch progress daily to ensure you’re on the right path to reach your goal. In the meantime, you might refine your strategies and make changes along the way.

For example, let’s say you see a PPC campaign is doing exceptionally well. You might want to throw a little more budget toward it to see if the results will improve. On the other hand, let’s say an experimental tactic is off to a bad start, you could nip it in the bud or try to refine it to improve its chances for success.

With consistent tracking, you’ll be continuously improving all your marketing efforts, making it more likely that you’ll reach or even exceed your expected ROI.

It’s also important to keep your client updated about your efforts so they won’t be surprised at the end of a tracking period. Clients always appreciate receiving marketing reports that tell them exactly what’s happening with their money and what they should expect.

In fact, consistent client reporting can hugely impact how satisfied your agency’s clients are. If you can create reports that demonstrate your agency’s impact and show all the numbers in a clear and concise manner, clients will appreciate your value. They’ll have peace of mind, and know that working with you was the right decision.

Pro Tip: Create dashboards for each of your clients. With Similarweb Dashboard capabilities, it only takes two clicks to share insights with colleagues and create reports for clients.

How Similarweb can help

One of the challenges that agencies face is managing multiple clients. Not only do agencies need to stay on top of different industries and trends, but they also need to focus on maximizing ROI for clients over many different channels. Similarweb Analytics for Agencies helps agencies deepen client relationships with the most trusted analytics through all stages of your funnel.

While your agency is building a proposal for a new prospective client, Similarweb can help you create data-driven pitches on how to improve a digital marketing strategy with real-time insights. Your agency will be able to analyze prospective clients’ market share and their competitive landscape, proving that you have intimate knowledge that will lead to success.

Once your agency starts working with a client’s marketing budget, Similarweb will help you optimize spending by providing you with unrivaled industry data on trends, search results, referral traffic, competitive analysis tools and more. Your agency will be able to build customized client dashboards and easily create reports to showcase your success to clients and pinpoint opportunities.

You’ll improve your clients’ ROIs, strengthen long-term client relationships, and prove the value your agency provides.

What’s next?

OK, we know there are tons of tools for agencies out there, and Similarweb provides some of the best. Your clients’ confidence in your abilities rides on you proving you know their business and have the tools to bring their dreams to reality. Your success is their success.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to maximize your clients’ marketing budgets and show them why they chose your agency to manage their marketing activities in the first place.

by Chloe Dougherty

Email Marketing Specialist

Chloe specializes in email and content marketing. She enjoys podcasts, reading short stories, and baking, and lives in Tel Aviv with her cat.