Determining the marketing budget for a whole year is not an easy task, and if you don’t have data to support your decision, the company will quickly change your mind. To set an exact amount you will need to know the data from other years and the potential customers essential to carry it out. Here are some of the main elements you will need to have when setting your budget:
- Set objectives.
- Base your budget on performance and efficiency.
- Information analysis.
- Phase your company is in.
- Sales funnel analysis.
To reach the desired number of customers it is very important to have a planned and organized budget, so you can establish a budget adjusted to the parameters of the company.
But how do you determine the amount needed for your budget for the whole year? Easy, the most important thing is to have data and information from previous years.
Approach MQLs to reach your goals
In this phase you will not need to know the data of the leads, but of the MQLs, for those new to the marketing world these acronyms stand for marketing qualified lead, that is to say a qualified lead potential, the perfect customer.
Once you determine your MQL you only need to consult the company’s historical revenue and funnel information. Here are the steps to follow so you can implement it in your company:
- Set a revenue target per quarter.
- Analyze data from previous years within a time frame.
- Measure transactions in each quarter (How many MQLs were captured and how many were converted to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).
- Calculation of the conversion rate using the above information. We can also look it up in a measurement program if we have it.
- Consult the revenue generated during a quarter.
- Calculation of the MQL you will need to reach the revenue generated in the last quarter.
It may seem an odyssey all this calculation, but if you have the relevant data and you know the market, you will be able to set the number of MQL needed to reach the number of revenues.
Getting leads
Time can work against you if you have to get leads quickly. The process of acquiring new customers is long and must go through different stages of the funnel. For this, you will have to take into account two very important métrics.
- The time it takes to be classified as a lead.
- The time it takes to make the first contact with the lead.
Once we know how long it takes to capture the lead, convert it to a lead and move on to SQL, we can keep track of how much time we will need for the number of leads predetermined in the budget.
Budget
Another key metric to consider is the cost per acquisition, in other words, the cost to the company of obtaining a new lead. To identify this type of cost it is important to consider the marketing costs involved in the process.
To calculate the cost per acquisition you divide the total marketing cost by the number of MQLs generated in a given period, for example in a business quarter.
For the development of the budget it is essential that the employee takes into account both the acquisition costs and the amount of activities carried out to capture that lead:
- Google searches.
- Ads on platforms.
- Display ads.
When you set up this whole calculation process you should always identify a specific quarter and perform all operations in that period so that there are no errors. For example, if your company’s accounts are annual and you want to calculate the budget quarterly, you will not be able to extrapolate this data.
Create a budget in your B2B
With all this information, it will be very easy to calculate the budget concisely. But, there is a big disadvantage: when setting a budget based on the strategies of another quarter, the data does not work with complete accuracy as this new period may undergo changes.
As mentioned above, another essential point that every company dreams of achieving is performance and efficiency. For this, there are programs that help to identify this type of effort and thus, obtain data on the performance of each channel, campaign or ad.
Here are a few that may be of help to you:
Below is a document created by HelloMrLead with the most important metrics for a company. The annual budget requires a lot of concentration and calculations so that everything is adjusted. Implement the metrics and programs that we have told you about and you will succeed!
