Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of Q4. But before you can kick back and relax next to the fire with a hearty glass of eggnog, you still need to draft next year’s budget.
Budget planning is a lot of things—exciting, exhilarating, nerve-racking—but it’s rarely straightforward. You’ll have to make critical decisions on how to create marketing success in an constantly shifting business landscape. No pressure.
Luckily, Pulse Marketing created this straightforward guide to help you get started planning for 2025. So if you spent the last three hours staring at a blank spreadsheet, constantly deleting the last thing you typed, this blog is for you!
Analyze Last Year’s Performance
Before you start planning for 2025, you’ll want to take a detailed look at 2024’s wins and losses. It’s time for a deep dive into last year’s marketing metrics!
Important questions to ask yourself:
- What campaigns performed best?
- What channels captured the most leads?
- Where did you see the lowest ROI?
- What new tactics/strategies do you want to try?
Conventional wisdom would dictate that you scrap your lowest performing channels (or at least lower the budget), invest more in your highest performing channels, and find some wiggle room to create test budgets to try emerging trends and technologies. Or, in other words, quit doing what’s not working, max out what is working, and play around with some things you think might work.
Also pay attention to seasonal trends. Many companies have a slow season that’s often consistent from one year to the next. One way to get over this hump is by pulling spending from one of your main channels and putting that money toward a focused campaign or seasonal promotion.
Define Marketing Objectives
Before you can create marketing success, you have to decide what success looks like for your organization. Depending on where you’re at in your business journey and what your current needs are, this might mean focusing on fundraising, brand awareness, or customer acquisition.
Once you’ve defined your overarching objectives, quantify your goals. Decide how many views, engagements, conversions, or money you need to generate to be successful. Then see if you can draw any correlations with existing data points. For example, if your best performing landing page consistently averages a certain number of conversions, how many leads do you need to drive to that page to reach your goal.
Determine Your Total Budget
There’s no hard and fast rule for how much you should spend on marketing, but a good starting place is 5-10% of your total revenue. If you’re really trying to kick things into overdrive and have money to burn, you might even consider pushing that number closer to 20%.
Account for Fixed and Variable Costs
After you’ve determined your total marketing budget for 2025, you can begin planning for expected costs. Start by determining fixed costs, like software, subscriptions, and salaries. Subtract that from your total budget to determine how much money you have left for variable costs, like pay-per-click ad campaigns.
Have a Little Budget Leftover
Over the last two years we’ve witnessed some major changes to the marketing landscape (A.I. anyone?). So to stay agile, we recommend saving some budget to invest in emerging trends and technologies.
While most of your marketing tech stack may already be accounted for under fixed costs, you may want to be able to add new tools during the year without having to cancel existing subscriptions—which is why it’s advisable to set money aside for these purposes.
New social media channels tend to award early adopters. Brands who are on the frontlines are sometimes treated more favorably by algorithms and garner staying power (like when Twitter first launched).
Even if you’re doing anything revolutionary, testing is always recommended. Testing new messaging, layouts, and graphics—when done correctly—will help you gather more data as you continue to refine your marketing strategy.
But how much of your marketing budget should you set aside for experimenting and possible opportunities? A good starting place is 5-10%.
Allocate the Budget by Channel
When breaking down your marketing budget for 2024, prioritize your highest performing channels. Split your budget according to the potential ROI and impact of each.
A Hubspot survey identified the following as the highest performing channels:
- Social media shopping tools (e.g., TikTok Shop)
- Web/blog/SEO
- Paid social media content
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
Need Help?
If any of this sounded like a foreign language to you, it may be worth considering outside contractors or a fractional marketing agency to help manage your yearly marketing efforts.
The best way to set yourself up for success in 2025 is to create a solid game plan to maximize ROI. But if you don’t know where to get started, or need a little extra manpower to get the ball rolling, look no further than Pulse Marketing.
Pulse is a fractional marketing agency that gives you access to an entire team of graphic designers, writers, content creators, and digital marketing experts. We’ll help you tell your story in a way that captures the hearts of your audience to grow your following and your budget.