How to Set an Ad Budget for Q2 & Beyond

What’s so important about a properly forecasted ad budget?

Prioritize spending

A well-planned ad spend budget ensures that a brand’s resources are being allocated in the most effective way possible. By setting priorities and limits, the brand can focus its resources on the most important areas and campaigns, instead of spreading resources too thin.

Manage costs

By setting a budget, a brand can better manage its costs and avoid overspending. This can help to ensure that the brand remains profitable and that resources are used in the most efficient way possible.

Measure performance

A well-planned ad spend budget can also help a brand measure the performance of its advertising campaigns. By tracking spending against results, the brand can identify which campaigns are generating the best return on investment and adjust its spending accordingly.

Facilitates forecasting

Setting a budget allows brands to forecast their advertising spend over a specific period of time, typically a fiscal year. This allows for more accurate financial planning and decision-making.

How to get started

Step 1:

Determine your goals, specifically: your revenue goal, your customer volume goal (how many customers do you want to obtain), and your visibility goal (how much traffic do you want to drive to the website, or how many people do you want to learn about your brand)

Step 2:

Order your goals by importance: Is revenue, customer acquisition, or brand awareness the most important priority this year?

Step 3:

Use an ad budget calculator, inputting your brand’s specific site, email, and ad performance metrics to date to determine how much you will need to spend to reach each of the three goals – BKMedia Group has a custom calculator that we’ve built, incorporating our learnings and client data from over 20 years of work in digital marketing, we can help you with this for free, schedule a free consultation.

Step 4:

Your budget should be what the ad budget calculator outputs for your top goal with a 20% flex to account for uncertainty. You should measure your primary goal on a monthly basis to determine if you are on track and pivot your ad strategy as needed. You should also measure you secondary and tertiary goals and consider them “icing” – perhaps you run 10% behind your primary goal, but if you are making at least partial progress on your other goals, you might consider that a success overall.

Summary

Overall, setting an ad spend budget is a critical aspect of effective advertising and marketing management for brands. It ensures that resources are being used in the most effective way possible, costs are managed, performance is measured, and financial forecasting is facilitated.

If you’re interested in learning more about ad spend forecasting, and more importantly how to do it right, contact BK today!