Campaign Budget

The next stage campaign budget involves taking decisions on the type of budgets which the client would want to spend on each separate channel and also the way they would want to allocate that spend across different buying options. They would also need to do prior research on historical RoI vs spends for campaigns across similar businesses/industries to be certain that they are not over-spending or under-utilizing their budgets.

Key pointers to help decide campaign budgets include:

1. Deciding on spend: Spends on digital campaigns typically vary between 5–15 per cent of the overall marketing budgets for any firm in present times. Firms mostly start with a round figure, for instance, ₹ 10 lakh, as the spend for digital campaigns. It would then be up to the hired agencies or digital marketing firms to break this pie and decide how much they would like to spend on a search-based campaign vis-à-vis a branding display campaign. As an example, for a display campaign, they would also need to decide on the amount appropriate to be spent for creating the initial buzz, amount to be deployed for product launch, and that to be put aside for future campaign sustenance. All these would be the guiding forces towards setting up measurement metrics for overall campaign too.
2. Bid/Quote analysis: Once the overall spend for each channel is decided, firms also need to do research to understand the amounts they should spend on a particular campaign. Most of the search campaigns, for example, run on an auction model, wherein clients have to bid for specific keywords against which they would want to show their campaign. Similarly, for executing display campaigns, firms need to know the price they should be quoting to advertise on different types of rich-media inventories, and which advertising technology tools would help them buy relatively inexpensive inventory with a broad reach.
3. Expected reach/leads/conversions: Once the budget and bid/quote amounts have been decided, firms also need to develop an idea of the kind of reach and impact they can expect from running campaigns across different channels. Some of the channels would be helpful in achieving impressions while others might have a cost even to acquire one visitor (specific target), convert it into a lead, and finally, ensure that he/she becomes a customer. Marketers need to determine how much investment they would like to make to convert such specific targets and the type of RoI (in terms of sales vs profitability figures) they expect to obtain.

We will cover the aspects of spend management, bidding/quote analysis and expected reach/CPM (Cost Per Mile) in broader details in the subsequent parts of this chapter where we will understand search and display campaigns in detail. In the following section, let us look at the next two aspects of campaign set-up and launch in more detail.