Planning your Marketing Budget

At the start of the year many business owners are making plans for the most effective ways to manage their finances. Any company has demands on their money and it takes a careful balancing act to work out the priorities. Some investments, such as recruitment, staff training or new technology can have a clearly quantifiable impact on efficiency and productivity.

In other areas of your business, such as marketing, it can be more challenging to see the direct results of investment. It is for this reason, that the marketing budget is often an area where investment gets squeezed. With traditional marketing methods, such as leaflet printing and distribution or newspaper adverts it was difficult to track the results, however with online marketing, there are analytics tools that take out the guess work.

Data Driven Marketing

Google Analytics is the most popular provider of data; it provides a wealth of information about your website visitors. The key to successful marketing campaigns is to select the data that is important to your marketing strategy, monitor it and take action based on the results.  Despite this free and highly valuable resource, which can show you what is working and what’s not, many businesses fail to use it to inform current and future marketing campaigns.

Data helps you to understand how your website is operating as an effective marketing tool and how your work on search engine optimisation (SEO) is working to attract more visitors to your web pages. It shows you which pages visitors spend time on, which they bounce off of and where you need to make improvements.

With this information at hand, it is easier to make calculated decisions on the value of your website for lead generation, sales or bookings. It helps you to understand the impact of SEO campaigns and can therefore help you to calculate how much you can spend on SEO in order to get a return on your investment. No more stabbing in the dark.

SEO Results

If your business website is a valuable online marketing tool, then SEO is a cost that needs to be on your list of budget priorities. You need to be aware that any SEO company that offers instant results or cheap solutions should be avoided. Unless you are investing in paid advertising, no SEO is instant; it takes time, effort and patience. There are no quick fixes, easy options or cheap ways to get good results. Cutting corners is more likely to destroy your online success.

For this reason, you need to be sure that you can commit financially to SEO for a minimum of 6 months. After a few months, you should start to see that your preparation and implementation, or the work of your SEO Company is starting to have an impact. This means that Google has recognised and indexed the work and your pages are moving up the rank.

The closer your pages get to the top spot, the easier it is for searchers to find your pages and the goods, services, information or advice that they were seeking. A growing awareness of what you offer will lead to an increase in the number of individuals who have the potential to become customers.

If you are looking for a credible SEO company, with experience of helping business web pages to move up the ranks using honest methods, visit Urban Media: Search Engine Optimisation

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