How to set a budget for Digital Marketing Plan?

In the search for our answer to “how to set a budget for Digital Marketing Plan?”, we need to start with a few important questions that you must ask yourself:

How much is it going to cost me to implement a digital marketing plan? How do I do it? Do I pay for the traffic? In which channels should I launch campaigns? Do I create content? Where do I begin?

Knowing that resources are limited, it is very important to know how to allocate them. Because a marketing plan with higher spending isn’t necessarily more effective!

In this article we explain how to set a budget for a Digital Marketing Plan. To give you more structure we will focus on the following topics:

• The importance of setting a budget for a marketing plan
• Know how to structure the budget
• Define the budget step by step
  • Web design and SEO
  • Search engine marketing (SEM)
  • Social networks
  • E-mail marketing

The importance of setting a digital marketing campaign

The digital marketing budget contemplates all the money or resources you intend to dedicate to your digital marketing plan during a specific period of time. Here it is very important to know where to invest your money to get the best results from your digital marketing plan.

In the end, we are talking about an investment like any other. What we are looking for is to maximise ROI (return on investment). If you are already executing a marketing plan and you are not getting the results you want, there could be two key causes:

• You are not investing effectively
• You are not investing enough

Later on, we will talk about what an investment is, as when we talk about investment, the first thing that comes to mind are Google or Facebook campaigns, disregarding other investment channels like content generation. This, in particular, can be equally or even more important, but as it consumes time it does not seem to have a marketing cost. Well, since time is money, obviously it does generate costs.

Planning and executing the budget effectively is critical, especially in situations where we are not meeting our short- and medium-term objectives.

Structuring a digital marketing budget

In the quest for our answer to “how to set a Digital Marketing Plan”, we start with the assumption that you have successfully identified your buyer persona and that you know what channels they use on a daily basis. What we recommend in this case is to analyse the competition:

• Look at their website type
• What keywords they rank for
• Whether they run campaigns or not
• Whether they create content on social networks
• Whether they create their own content
• Whether they give you the option to subscribe to their newsletter
• Also if it has available downloadable materials to collect emails and then nurture them with own content.

By studying the competition you can gain a general idea of their level of digital marketing dedication. Here are some tools that can help you to study your competitors:

• Semrush 
  • to see the relevance of your competitors’ websites.
  • What keywords they rank for
  • Whether they launch Google Ads campaigns
• Facebook ads library
  • You will be able to see the types of ads they launch
  • And since when they launch these ads
• Linkedin
  • You can also see data such as workers
  • Whether they advertise and the type of advertising.
• Wappallizer
  • Shows the types of tools used by the web (WordPress, Mailchimp, Klaviyo).

Once we know what our competition has and does, we will know where to dedicate more efforts.

Web design

This is the most important part, which you should start with. It is where the magic happens in the digital environment. You can’t afford to have a mediocre website and launch campaigns. You will literally be throwing your money away.

In your budget contemplate resources to meet expenses such as domain, hosting and website support. It is important to design the website focusing on the user experience, and not on the company’s point of view. It is typical a company’s websites to give you the feeling of “Look, I am XXX and we are very good because of the amount of things we do”. Instead, the website has to be designed with the objective of:

• Attracting traffic from search engines always taking into account mobile-first.
• Guaranteeing an excellent user experience
• Ensuring optimal loading speed
• Setting call-to-actions (CTAs) with clear and intuitive messages
• Including incentives for email collection through ebooks
• Capturing leads and generating conversions

But speaking of money…

How much will such a website cost us?

Domain approximately 10 euros

Maintenance and hosting about 100 euros

And the website? Well, the best thing to do is to consult the experts. The minimum price can be around 800 euros and the limit is that there is no limit. This, without taking into account a good copywriter that could be around 700 euros.

From experience, we would say that a good website with a CMS like WordPress and a good visual layout designer would cost approximately 3000-3700 euros.

Perfect, sounds good to me. What’s the next step?

Organic SEO positioning

Whether you are just starting or have been doing it for a while, SEO is one of the most effective ways to attract potential customers through search engines like Google.

You are likely not able to handle SEO by yourself. Speaking in general and without going into details, SEO requires technical knowledge. Her is some of they key knowledge required:

• Set a good web architecture to be relevant to Google.
• Generate content on a weekly basis
• Work with h1,h2,h3…
• Work with Alt attribute of the images
• Generate a sitemap
• Upload it to google search console

How much can SEO work cost?

A post of 1000 words, which is recommended, can range between 30 and 80 euros. On the other hand, the SEO audit plus the changes are usually between 40 and 200 euros per hour. In Cronuts we recommend the following: make 4 posts per month, and review what could be improved monthly through google search console.

In short, normally the SEO budget of a small company can range between 1000-1500 euros per month.

Search engine advertising (SEM) and social ads

We have heard about it and this is the first thing we want to activate. Classic mistake, as we have already mentioned, is to first create a good website and then think about how to launch traffic on it.

Here the range is huge.  We can pay for google ads focused on certain words (SEM) or use the so-popular social ads. Both strategies are usually carried out by a trafficker or traffic manager.

This is a very powerful tactic to bring traffic. In fact there are almost 4000 million people in different online networks. Why not be there?

Social Media

A very effective channel to reach your consumer directly. You can impact all parts of the customer’s life, from reaching your audience, stimulate returning customers, create community and drive traffic.

It depends a lot on the sector you are in. If you are more of a B2C, we recommend Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok. If you are more of a B2B, we would say Youtube and Linkedin. The key to success is to be selective and know in which platform you want to be present.

How much would the networks cost us?

Networks require a lot of dedication, content and work if you want to get results. You would need images, video and very powerful copies to generate great content.

An agency or freelancer could be a good choice, typically charging between 100 and 1200 euros per month depending on the dedication and the need for content generation.

Email marketing

The strategy with the highest conversion rate but of course, limited by the number of emails we have to contact. It is important to create automations that set up a sequence and that are focused on the users, motivating them to buy or be interested in our services.

In order to obtain an email, we recommend the use of lead magnets to activate these sequences and try to maximize the sales. Great, but what budget do I need?

How much would it cost to implement an email marketing strategy?

First of all you would need an email marketing tool. There are many tools, like mailchimp or mailrelay. If we had to choose one we would recommend is Active Campaign (from 9 euros per month).

Implementing the automatic chains plus the ebooks can cost you between 30 euros and 150 euros per email. The most interesting thing is to find a profile that knows SEO and email marketing in order to package both items.

To summarize

Tips for setting a digital marketing budget and executing it

The smartest way to invest is to first go for the “must”. How to structure the website effectively and include relevant content. Work on copies and lead magnets as well as email marketing automations. Finally, try to test a few paid channels to see if the objectives are met and gradually increase the investment.

In the end, the goal is to maximize ROI. For this you will have to evaluate the fixed and recurring costs you have. Additionally, you will also have to decide whether to outsource services as you will have to assess whether:

• You have the time and expertise to execute each task.
• You have the time to outsource the services and have someone else do it for you

Finally, it’s all about finding a balance between investment and return on investment. At Cronuts, we know that working on all these services is complicated. Simply because of two factors:

• Finding the experts at a modest price
• Interacting with all of them

It can cost a lot of time and money. That’s why we provide a comprehensive service that covers all of the above and more. We encourage you to take a look at our SME services page.

As we’ve seen, setting a budget for your digital marketing plan is not just a financial exercise; it’s a strategic necessity. By asking yourself key questions—such as how much it will cost to implement your plan, which channels to prioritize, and whether to invest in content—you lay the groundwork for a successful marketing strategy. Remember, effective allocation of your limited resources is crucial; a higher budget does not guarantee better results. At Cronuts Digital, we hope to have given you all the answers to “how to set a budget for Digital Marketing Plan” and that you can put all this into practice.