Creating a budget for your small business's marketing efforts is an important step in ensuring the success of your marketing plan. By carefully allocating your resources, you can ensure that you're reaching your target audience and achieving your marketing goals.
To get started, you'll need to identify your marketing goals. These could include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving sales. Once you know what you're trying to accomplish, you can research your target market to understand who they are, what they want, and how they prefer to be reached. This will help you determine the best channels to use for your marketing efforts.
Next, you'll need to create a budget. Start by determining how much money you have available to spend on marketing. Then, allocate that money to the various channels and tactics that you plan to use. It's important to prioritize the channels that are most likely to help you reach your goals and to allocate more of your budget to these channels.
Once you have a budget in place, it's important to monitor and adjust it as needed. As you implement your marketing plan, keep an eye on your budget to ensure that you're staying on track and making the most of your marketing dollars. You may need to adjust your budget if certain tactics aren't working as well as you had hoped, or if you have additional resources available to invest in your marketing efforts.
Creating a budget for your small business's marketing efforts is a critical step in ensuring the success of your marketing plan. By carefully allocating your resources and monitoring your budget, you can ensure that you're reaching your target audience and achieving your marketing goals.
Here is a super simple quick calculator to use as a *rough estimate of what your costs will look like. You can use it as a monthly or yearly calculator. It's simply here with titles of items that clients were not aware of in the past.
And to help your reference guide here are some quick numbers and search links to help you!
Shopify - a new store starts with a 14-day free trial at which time you have to decide on a subscription plan. Most people start with the Basic which is $29.99 USD/month. If you sign up for a whole year you save 10%.
Apps - You can head to the Shopify App Store to find the cost of the apps you feel you might need.
Custom Coding - You might just want to need a custom code to get your website just right! This one can cost anywhere between $100 to thousands. So, to avoid this cost, you can do extra research on the theme you choose to use in Shopify when you start. The free themes are quite nice, with many to choose from and are perfect for new small business accounts. However (not included in the calculator) you have the option of paying for a more robust paid theme from the start which runs between $350+ USD. I didn't include it in the calculator because it's something that sometimes scares new business owners as the costs rack up and it makes some feel as tho the free themes are subpar which they are not!
This blog can of course go and on! But use this as a cheat sheet - there are no right or wrong answers. You have hard costs and soft costs and being prepared is the best course of action.
Finally, be very wary of anyone that tries to convince you that increasing your budget beyond your means or comfort level is the way to reach your goals!
Have any questions? Get in touch and book a FREE call to chat about your goals and how Shopify can be the best option for your business.
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