How to strategically manage your marketing spend with 8 integrated simple marketing budget templates

Setting strategic and channel direction, working toward commercial objectives and KPIs, and monitoring your success is great. But if you're not tracking your ROI per channel it's hard to understand how much money you've had to spend to see a return. That's why you need a practical, accessible marketing budget.

How much budget is allocated to marketing?

The latest CMO survey found that yearly growth in marketing spending is predicted to rise from 11.7% to 13.6% in 2023. Within this growing budget, digital marketing spending, which currently accounts for 57.1% of marketing budgets, is expected to grow by 16.2% over the next year. A competitive marketing environment in 2023 means…

9 key differences between strategy vs tactics

‘What is the difference between strategy vs tactics?’ is one of the most common questions that 'crops up' when I’m running training workshops or discussing creating marketing plans with businesses. It’s no surprise since the difference between these two activities often isn’t distinct. Yet, it’s an important question to answer since our research shows that so many businesses don’t have a clear marketing strategy or plan. Without a clear strategy, it’s likely some of your tactics may be poorly directed, so may not be propelling the business in the direction needed.

9 key features that distinguish marketing strategy vs tactics

In this article, I will show the difference between strategy and tactics by looking at the characteristics of marketing strategy, which distinguish it from tactics. I’ll give examples that help show the difference between the two based on essential strategic activities.

What's the difference between strategy vs tactics?

Strategy dictates…

Discover how to use our customer journey mapping template to create actionable insights to improve your marketing

In today’s digitally connected world, customers have a myriad of choices when it comes to connecting with brands and businesses. There are many benefits to this, such as greater reach and more touchpoints to connect with customers, but there are also some drawbacks.  When looking at customer journeys, there is rarely only one route available, making understanding how your customers find and interact with you more challenging.  Consider the London tube map. Let’s say you want to get to Oxford Circus. You know you can always get the Central (red) line, but you could also get the Bakerloo (brown) line or the Victoria (blue) line, depending on where you are coming from. Each journey is slightly different, and will give you a particular type of experience. …

Leading digital analytics experts share their examples of how to effectively use data and analytics to generate actionable insights for your marketing strategy

The number of data sources that are available is growing every day. For some of us, this might be a good thing, but for many digital marketers it brings up a lot of challenges to deal with. With increased data, it can be easy to lose focus, become obsessed by 'vanity metrics', and fail to generate actionable insights for your business. McKinsey notes that surges in data caused by rapid digital disruption 'have not provided marketers with a substantially better understanding of their customers, because their companies’ outdated data modeling isn’t able to capture these shifts with the necessary granularity and speed'. So, while the innovators are leading the way with actionable analytics feeding their data-driven marketing, others become stagnant. In today's competitive marketing landscape, this means…

Learn how to create a PESTLE analysis to identify threats and opportunities in the macro environment to guide your marketing planning

You may have heard PESTLE mentioned when studying marketing theory or in your workplace. It is a powerful, yet simple, analysis tool for overall business and marketing planning. In this blog we explain what it is, why it is useful, and how you can create your own PESTLE analysis for marketing planning today.

What is a PESTLE analysis?

PESTLE is an acronym that covers 6 key areas in your macro (external) environment. Each letter stands for a different factor, as shown in the graphic below: Did you know? Sometimes it is referred to as a PEST analysis, or spelt ‘PESTEL’, but the most common acronym is PESTLE. A PESTLE analysis is a framework to help you identify external factors - happening outside…

Dr. Dave Chaffey, author of Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice explains a process to achieve success by focusing on the 18 most important digital marketing techniques

Simply put, our definition of digital marketing, or online marketing, is: "Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology." Within this broad digital marketing definition, there are many vital channels and platforms that we will introduce and share strategies and tactics for in this article, as well as the key digital marketing KPIs and metrics for success. Our globally acclaimed RACE Framework is a digital marketing structure that enables marketers to plan, manage, and optimize all aspects of their customers' online and offline brand experiences. In this overview of digital marketing we will cover: What is digital marketing? 18 key types of digital marketing techniques across 6 media channel How to achieve the business benefits of digital marketing using the 5Ss Key…

Digital marketing is more important now than ever. My recommendations on the challenges and opportunities for growth

Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? It's still a common challenge since many businesses know how vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining customers. Yet they don't have an integrated plan to support digital transformation and business growth based on engaging their audiences effectively online. The importance of digital channels in influencing brand discovery is highlighted by this research from Global Web Insight published in the Datareportal April 2023 Global Snapshot report. This research shows that if you don't compete by maintaining quality online content to gain visibility within search engines and social networks, then you're missing out on opportunities to reach new customers. Regardless of the type of business, if your…

Create a co-ordinated 'always-on' digital marketing strategy for the whole customer lifecycle to boost conversions and retention

It's no secret that engaging your customers is crucial to achieving continued sales, and it's also well known that it is usually far easier and costs less to get repeat business from existing customers than it is to acquire new ones from scratch. Customer relationship management (CRM) is well established as a process to try to achieve this, but this customer lifecycle 'relationship' begins with the first contact with the customer (when they are still a contact or prospect). We believe that the best way for a company or brand to build relationships is through a planned always-on marketing approach of integrated communications across multiple digital channels. To enable this, we're fortunate today to have many martech options for marketing automation, so we can create a co-ordinated contact strategy to engage audiences through: …

Are you practicing always-on marketing, and if not, why not?

In the pre-digital era, marketing activities were planned in campaign ‘bursts’ around new product launches and promotions. My belief is that to be effective, digital marketing needs a change in mindset so businesses invest sufficient time and budget into continuously  optimizing ‘always-on’ activities which can be used in an integrated way to maximise visibility and conversion through the customer lifecycle.

What is always-on marketing?

Always-on marketing: A working definition

Always-on marketing means a planned approach to scheduling and optimizing continuous marketing activities which support customer acquisition and retention throughout the customer lifecycle. Consider the main types of digital marketing. Think about these key digital media I define in my Digital Marketing: Strategy and Implementation book. If you operate in a market where your potential customers are continuously searching for new products and services that you offer then you can't be competitive unless you continuously…

What are the essential parts of a multichannel marketing plan template?

Multichannel marketing, or omnichannel marketing, is the process of utilizing online and offline marketing communications channels to target and engage with your customers. As outlined in our popular Learning Path module, structure a plan using the RACE Planning framework, the purpose of a multichannel marketing strategy is to empower marketers and managers to plan, manage and optimize the resources needed to achieve business sales targets. The timeframe is typically annual but potentially longer-term, such as 18 months to three years. Examples of communications channels could include, for example: Websites Physical stores Catalogs E-mail marketing TV Text messaging Blogging Direct mail The goal is to deliver leads and sales targets for defined products and services, which can apply to an organization as a whole, or a single market if there are multiple markets and product or service categories. An effective omnichannel approach to marketing…