Planning your budget for the year? Read these top tips first!

Learning to manage your marketing budget can be tricky. At Podymos, we know what goes into making a successful campaign and how much it should cost, so we’ve created this guide to help walk you through the process.

By the end of this article, you should have a clearer idea of how you can allocate your marketing budget to maximise your time and money.

In this section, we’ll run through some practical steps to consider when planning your budget for the year.

Ensuring that your budget aligns with your 3-, 6- and 12-month goals is a great place to start. Why? Because it will make sure that all the tactical marketing activities you include in your budget will have the end goal in mind.

Often companies look to achieve as many deliverables as possible with their budget, but this isn’t necessarily the best plan as it can lead to a diluted and less effective strategy.

The best thing to remember is its always about where you want to be in 3, 6 or 12 months. If a tactic isn’t going to help you to get you there, then it really shouldn’t be included in your budget.

Once you’ve aligned your tactics with your objectives for the next 3, 6 or 12 months, it’s important to triple check these will really deliver what you want. For instance, if you’re looking for more leads, you may decide to spend a large chunk of your budget on social media campaigns and videos. But will these actually help you to achieve your goals?

Sure, they may raise brand awareness, but if your audience isn’t going to your website and then converting once they’re there, they aren’t helping to achieve your lead generation goal.

In this case, it might be better to split your budget and invest half in optimising your website to drive conversions and half on increasing traffic through social media and videos. This will mean you target any problems on your site that are preventing conversion, ultimately meaning your awareness activities will have a greater impact on lead generation.

How much will a campaign actually cost? Often, it’s more than planned as any good campaign will need to be modified when its initial performance data is reviewed. As such it’s a good strategy to slightly overestimate/add a buffer to individual budgets to allow for this optimisation.

A great example of this could be social media. Videos are more costly to create than graphics, but after a while of posting, you may find that videos perform better, so having an extra budget means that you are able to accommodate for this and release more of the content your audience is responding to. It really is all about the data.

The digital world is a fast-paced, ever-changing environment, which means that you should consider setting aside a portion of your budget in case your strategy needs to be adapted to cover a new situation.

Holding back 5-10% of your total marketing budget can really provide you with breathing room so you can react to your changing environment.

Another important thing to remember is that your budget doesn’t have to be set in stone. Things change in both the marketing and medical device worlds, so don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your budget in 6 – 9 months to realign with your goals.

The most important thing is that you meet your objectives, not that you complete everything mapped out in your marketing budget.

A good indicator of where you’re going is where you have been. Take a deep dive into your marketing data from previous years and see what campaigns are working and why.

Look for gaps in your marketing that could do with more financial support and which ones could do with less.

For example, is there a certain marketing activity that is haemorrhaging money for little ROI? Maybe it’s worth looking at the activities that are performing well and investing more money there.

As the year draws to an end, you may find yourself wondering what to do with any leftover cash. Buying materials for the next year is a great way to utilise the remaining budget whilst also preparing for the year ahead.

Certain materials can be a great long-term investment, including:

• Photography
• Graphics
• Visual assets and aids
• Powerpoint deck templates
• Videos
• Animations

These are materials that you can use time and time again, and you may be able to use them across several different future campaigns.

When planning your budget, you should ensure your marketing tactics are aligned with upcoming clinical data publications and new product launches. You’re most likely already know what these are, but if not speak with your clinical and product development teams to find out what’s coming up this year.

Keep in mind that your budget should act as a guide, you cannot go over it, but you can move around within it to account for changes throughout the year. The most important thing is that you hit your business objectives, not that you stick to your original plan like glue.

To learn more about how to plan and manage your budget, why not take a look
at a few more of our articles:

• Should you be doing content marketing? An honest review
• How much does an effective content marketing strategy really cost in 2023?
• What is the point of medical device branding?
• How much does a medical device website cost?

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality content campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the medical device space. This means we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below, and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no-obligation chat.