Budgeting for small business marketing differs from other types of budgeting. There are loads of sites that provide basic advice on budgeting for small business. But this post provides marketing specific budgeting tips.

If you prefer to start at the beginning of my series on budgeting, you can link to it below:

Marketing Budget Basics: Review and Overview 1

Budgeting For Small Business Marketing
Tip 1: Know Costs For Everything

Know the cost of everything that you need for your marketing campaign. Guessing leads to poor budgeting. So you need to know the costs of photography, artwork, printing, folding, mailing lists, labeling and sorting, delivery, postage, advertising, etc.

Everything you want to include in your marketing campaign should be itemized with realistic costs. Then if there’s not enough money in the budget to do everything, you can decide before starting the campaign what to include and what you can’t afford.

Budgeting For Small Business Marketing
Tip 2: Budget By Desired Results

Communicate the budget as what it costs to achieve specific results.

By linking costs to performance and outcomes, you’ll make better marketing and budgeting decisions and improve your return on marketing investment.

Budgeting For Small Business Marketing
Tip 3: Use Computer Power

Use computer power to manage your budget. In this computer age, you can try different budgeting options and see how your expenses and results differ by options.

Computer power also enables developing master spreadsheets, tracking individual projects and linking each to the master spreadsheet. This allows estimating cash-flow, and monitoring expenditures against cost estimates.

Budgeting For Small Business Marketing
Tip 4: Include Staff Expenses

Use budgets to direct staff efforts, to schedule staff resources, to contract for services, to track project costs and to establish accountability.

People power is generally the most expensive part of a marketing campaign. But some small business owners forget to budget the time that their employees spend on marketing. Without counting labor, your budget will fail to reflect your actual marketing costs.

Budgeting For Small Business Marketing
Tip 5: Review Budget Frequently

It does no good to write a marketing budget, stick it in a drawer and never look at it again.

For budgeting to work, you have to let your budget guide your decisions and actions. You have to constantly monitor what you’ve spent at any point in the marketing campaign compared to what you budgeted.

Then you have to make adjustments to stay in budget. These adjustments vary from eliminating some marketing tactics to completely scraping a marketing campaign.

My next series is on Internal Communications. You can access the first in this series by clicking the link below:

Internal Marketing Communication: Introduction and Definition

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Posted 12-5-08:
Budgeting For Small Business Marketing
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