Hotel marketing budgets comprise a distinct type of marketing budgeting. This post summarizes the top ten Google results, forming recommendations for including off line and online marketing activities.
This post provides the first monthly roundup of posts for this blog. It summarizes and links to five posts on marketing budgets, originally published between September and December 2008.
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.
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:
This review of Marketing Budget Basics includes five steps of setting your marketing budget. I covered the first two steps in part 1. You can link to it below:
I’m covering the last three steps in today’s post.
Step 3 Of Setting Your Marketing Budget
Decide What To Include
In Your Marketing Budget
Every marketing budget is unique in that categories included are customized to those activities most used by the business. Marketing Budget Basics includes the following categories:
Advertising
Consultants
Direct mail
Membership dues
Postage
Promotional items
Proposals
Publications
Research
Salaries
Seminars
Subscriptions
Technology
Training
Web site
Miscellaneous
By including a miscellaneous category, you devote marketing funds to cover “unperceived opportunities.”
Step 4 Of Setting Your Marketing Budget
Decide The Percentage Of Your Business
Budget To Devote To Marketing
Different types of businesses devote different portions of their budgets to marketing. Service businesses generally spend a smaller proportion on marketing than product businesses.
For example, more than a third of accountants allot only one to two percent of their budgets to marketing. Attorneys average spending 2.4 percent of gross revenues on marketing. Yet, many product businesses match production and marketing costs. Some even devote half their business budgets to marketing.
Step 5 Of Setting Your Marketing Budget
Monitoring Your Marketing Budget
The fifth and continuous step in setting your marketing budget is to monitor and adjust it as needed. Now you may not be able to make many adjustments within a budget period, but you need to keep track of what you spend on marketing by category so you can adjust between budget periods.
Close monitoring of your marketing budget enables you to stay constantly on top of marketing costs and return on investments. It also reveals if you go over budget to support a particular marketing objective.
If you want to learn more about marketing budgets, click on the link below:
You can also sign up for my RSS feed in the upper right corner. Or you can receive weekly email announcements of my posts by completing the form below:
Posted 11-30-08:
Marketing Budget Basics:
Review and Overview 2
Marketing Budget Basics is the most concise overview of marketing budgets that I’ve ran across.
I was searching my desktop for some of my notes on marketing budgets when I ran across a pdf document entitled Marketing Budget Basics: Financial Muscle for Marketing Plan Implementation. No author information was provided.
I don’t remember how I got Marketing Budget Basics so I don’t know that I have the right to give you a copy. I did a search with Marketing Budget Basics within quote marks, but Goggle returned no results. So I don’t know where to send you to get a copy.
But I can tell you about it. In fact, I plan two posts to provide an overview of Marketing Budget Basics and then a few more posts on marketing budgets.
Marketing Budget Basics cites The Spring 2001 issue of Capstone Quarterly and a couple of 2001 studies. So I assume it was written in 2001 or 2002.
I did a search for Capstone Quarterly and learned that it’s a newsletter for CapStone Bank. So Marketing Budget Basics appears to just cite the newsletter, not to have been published in the newsletter or by Capstone Quarterly.
Some of the marketing budget information in Marketing Budget Basics includes:
Two ways of determining marketing budgets.
1. Amount spent in the prior year and increase/decrease, as appropriate.
2. Amount required to meet strategic marketing goals and objectives.
Setting budgets on strategic marketing goals and objectives provides the better way of determining the funds committed to a marketing budget.
To use this method of setting your marketing budget, you follow five steps. I’ll cover the first two steps in this post and the last three in my next post.
Step 1 Of Setting Your Marketing Budget
Set Goals And Decide On Strategies
Ideally you just pull these from your marketing plan. But if you don’t have a marketing plan, the steps involved in setting your marketing budget will start one.
Step 2 Of Setting Your Marketing Budget
Research Costs To Achieve Goals And Implement Strategies
Include the costs for each strategy to meet each goal. Also include the costs for each tactic to meet each objective.
You may not include all tactics and strategies in your final marketing budget, but you need to know the costs for each in order to decide which will provide the greatest return on investment and which can best be cut with the least harm to the marketing campaign.
To read the next three steps of setting your marketing budget, click the link below:
And if you want to assure that you never miss one of my marketing posts, sign up for my RSS feed in the upper right corner, or complete the form below to get email announcements of each week’s post:
Posted 11-28-08:
Marketing Budget Basics:
Review and Overview 1
Linda holds a Doctorate in Education (Ed.D.) and is accredited in Public Relations (APR). She has practiced marketing, public relations and communication skills for over 30 years. She is President of Best Books Plus, Inc., an online and off line publishing company.
Entries (RSS)
and 
