What to have in mind to define the budget for my B2B campaign?

One of the biggest challenges when thinking about a B2B marketing campaign is the definition of the budget. How much should I spend? How should I calculate it? There are many ways of deciding this, but here we will list some tips and good practices to have in mind when this moment comes.

If you have run this kind of campaign before, of course, you can take the results of previous campaigns to define objectives and then allocate resources. But if you haven’t, or you have different objectives than before, you will need to start from scratch.

The usual recommendation to define the budget for marketing is based on the company revenues. According to the CMO Survey from the American Marketing Association issued in February 2020 for a B2B services company the marketing budget should be 7,9%.

Once you have your marketing budget decided you should calculate your marketing costs, both fixed and variable, to understand how much you have left for your campaigns and activations. You can also calculate a part of your budget (let’s say between 3 and 5%) for eventualities.

After you calculate your costs, start allocating the budget to the campaigns. For this, a good guideline to follow is the 70-20-10 rule:

– 70% of your budget is allocated toward strategies you know work well.
– 20% of your budget is allocated toward new strategies aimed at helping you grow.
– 10% of your budget is allocated toward experimental strategies.

Besides this rule, you should always keep these tips in mind when distributing your budget:

– Know your buyer’s journey.
– Align your budget with your marketing goals.
– Beware of hidden costs.
– Remember where your priorities lie.
– Prepare to measure ROI.

This last point is particularly important: according to the report “Top marketing trends of the decade” more than half of marketers have indicated they have not been able to quantitatively measure the impact of their marketing spending.

One more question that might come up when planning your budget is: should I plan a monthly or an annual budget? The answer to this question will depend entirely on how you want to measure your campaigns and how your company is structured. Planning monthly will give you more opportunities to adjust things along the way while planning yearly will give you a clear map of where you want to arrive at the end of that year.

Now you have everything you need to define the budget for your B2B campaigns. Spend it wisely!