If you’re looking to succeed in any sort of business, the internet is going to be an asset to you (if you use it wisely). Allocating a budget for your business activities, such as internet marketing efforts, is important but setting the budget isn’t always going to be easy and you’ll want to review things and revisit that budget often.

Marketing without a loose budget is like trying to succeed without an action plan. You need to allocate money to your internet marketing efforts. Your budget plan can’t always be planned too far in advance, though. Internet marketing is a lot different from traditional marketing.

Why? You can quickly see the fruits of your labour and those fruits might lead you to want to plant more seeds to take advantage of things that are working well. And you can see what’s not working and decide to divert part of your budget elsewhere, too.

Traditional marketing campaigns were often planned far in advance. It wasn’t unusual for a company to plan and set a budget once per year. But the internet moves faster than that. And because of that it’s far easier to see which of your efforts are working well — optimising your marketing spend.

Here are some tips for setting and managing your budget and for devising a great internet marketing plan, too:

• Do a monthly review of your website’s traffic levels. Looking at the traffic levels and traffic sources can help you determine which efforts from the previous month have been the most successful.
• Work with an internet marketing company who can help. Many businesses now work with online marketing consultants instead of in-house marketing staff. Due to the continually evolving online landscape this can help you be sure that you’re taking advantage of all available opportunities to market.
• Leave some room in your budget for unexpected expenses and for unexpected opportunities.
• Use a diverse approach. Don’t rely on one marketing method alone. For example, don’t put all your effort into SEO and none into paid advertising (and vice versa).  The great thing about 21^st century marketing methods is that you can test out multiple methods concurrently and get a good idea of what’s working and what isn’t pretty quickly.
• Don’t be too impatient. While we’ve just said, in the above bullet, that things can happen quickly … they don’t always happen as quickly as you want. It can sometimes be prudent to adopt a wait and see attitude with certain types of marketing methods, such as SEO, which can take time depending on many factors including how competitive of an industry you are in.
• If you choose to work with an SEO and marketing company, regularly measure how well they’re working out for you. Make sure you’re working with a firm that knows what they’re doing and that listens to your wants and goals as a customer.

If you need help with SEO or other internet marketing, we’d be happy to talk strategy with you. Please contact us for a consultation. Call 1300 662 990.

photo credit: 401k, Flickr.