Budgeting for a moving company is never exactly simple. However, when digital marketing costs are added on top of everything else, that’s when things get extra complicated. Especially since your desire to market your moving business can often get out of hand, resulting in unexpected financial losses. To avoid this, here’s how to budget your digital marketing investments!
Go over your current costs
The first step needed to properly budget your digital marketing investments is going over all your current expenses. Now, most of the time, the operating costs for marketing seem low. This is because you are separating the whole picture into piecemeal bits that are easy to individually swallow. The cost of running an ad? Not bad. The costs of hiring a marketing team? Not that high in comparison to other things. And so on and on it goes, until you take a step back and reevaluate exactly what you are paying for.
Then, you will likely have a brief moment of panic over just how much money is going to marketing drives that are either underperforming or doing nothing for you at all. A good example is knowing all about the importance of backlinks for movers, but pointlessly investing in buying backlinks to your site instead of earning them.
Review past results
Through your audit of expenses, you will also have a chance to see just how well all of them have been performing. This is important for a simple reason: if something is working well, don’t mess with it. For example, you might notice that a website quote calculator is a surprisingly big draw on your website.
If that’s the case, do not try and ‘improve’ it by changing it, and definitely do not try and ‘draw’ some of the crowd that flocks to it to other marketing drives on your site. This is a good way to annoy your site’s visitors by trying to push something on them. Most will only see it as a reason to abandon your site and go somewhere they won’t have to deal with constant, pushy promotions. Of course, finding failing or lagging marketing drives necessitates making changes to properly activate them.
Pick the best performing marketing channels
To properly budget your digital marketing investments, prioritize the channels that have the best effectiveness. Here are a few examples.
- Social media marketing: find the social media platform that works best for you and your team and focus on it. Do not abandon the other platforms completely, but just use them as mirrors of your main one.
- Ads: Prioritize ad types with guaranteed effects. Google Ads (PPC) are probably your best choice. They are extremely cost-effective since you only pay for people who actually click through to your site.
- Affiliate marketing: It is fine to hire a lot of affiliates at first, just to see which of them perform well. But, from then on, focus on the good performers and forge long-term deals.
- Local citations: local business citations are important, but if the site charges for hosting your data, eliminate the ones which perform poorly.
Set your budget
You need to know exactly how much you are willing to invest in digital marketing. Do not underestimate the importance of setting a hard limit. We mentioned before that expenses can quickly get out of control if you only pay attention to individual drives. Setting a strict budget will at least help mitigate the effects of impulse investments. Now, does this mean there should never be any exceptions that allow you to go over this budget? No. There are always rare opportunities that need to be seized or you’ll regret it. But, that’s what adapting your marketing plan to current circumstances is all about.
Decide on your concrete goals
It is important to have clear-cut goals for your marketing drives. Of course, you should try and be somewhat realistic. Drawing up a goal such as ‘doubling my customer base’ and ‘increasing profits by at least fifty percent over the last quarter’ are all well and good, but when you can’t hit them you’ll just feel miserable. Not to mention this forces your employees to reach for the stars and inevitably fail. Know just how much you can achieve by analyzing the market. Is the realistically enough wiggle roof in the local market for you to increase your customer base explosively? Of course, if you take proper advantage of marketing and SEO for moving companies, growth is always possible. But, it is a gradual rather than explosive thing.
Rehash your marketing strategy
Obviously, all these efforts to budget your digital marketing investments will seriously impact your previous marketing strategy. So, you need to develop a marketing strategy nearly from scratch. This time, with proper budget limits and checks in place. The execution of your marketing strategy needs to be carefully monitored, and any investment venue that starts to lag needs to either be cut out immediately or approached with a different strategy.
Be ready to adapt
All of your efforts to plan out and budget your digital marketing investments are meant to generate more leads for movers. And, naturally, this means that your strategy cannot be wholly rigid. In the real world, things change. Often quickly and rather abruptly. This means that, in addition to having checks that will allow you to reconsider your budget, it may be smart to create and maintain an ‘emergency’ budget on the side. Both for allowing you to revitalize drives that suddenly need more funds and as the funding you can dip into if a new, previously unseen, or not viable marketing investment opportunity opens up. This is the only way to react quickly and decisively at important junctures.
Final comment
Knowing how to budget your digital marketing investments, you should at least be able to avoid letting your expenses pile up. So long as you prioritize the marketing solutions that are working and quickly abandon or revisit the ones that are not, you should be able to make your investments count!
