Study Notes
Download pdf 895 KB
12 years delivering excellence
Join a global community
Globally recognised
Toolkits, content & more
A resource map is a clear layout of all of the resources that you will require and that they will be required for. And the reason why we do this is so we can create a holistic understanding on the various costs that will be associated with the development of the campaign. It also helps us to allocate financial resources in a much more robust way. The final thing that it does, it also enables us to not waste team time and effort. So creating efficiencies is critical. When planning ahead of time, this resource map will save you a lot in budget afterwards.
When defining a budget, what are the key considerations we need to take in this process?
That’s perhaps a bit generic from a budgeting perspective. What are some of the key things that you need to think about specifically for digital?
When defining your budgeting process, make sure that you robustly determine the level of investments and how you’re going to invest across your various digital assets as well.
The budget can be broken down to different levels.
Budgets are broken down straight from a high-level strategic point of view, which is clearly done within perhaps an annual budgeting cycle. This is done through our many organizations, where in essence they know at a high level what is the marketing budget for that following year.
The second thing then becomes a quarterly planning process, which is largely business driven. Think about heads of marketing trying to determine exactly what they want to spend their money on, perhaps what type of media resources, perhaps it’s all about trying to understand what the big campaigns could be from a quarterly perspective.
And then finally, you have more operational decisions, which are either done say on a monthly basis or actually even on a daily basis. So, for example, you’ll get marketing managers understanding exactly how they need to tweak their budgets from month to month to be able to optimize the actual campaign that they’re trying to drive. When thinking about budgeting, you need to do it across these three key spectrums.
You can use data and analytics to help you optimize the budget.
You can aim to optimize the following:
When it comes to budgeting for digital integration, you need to consider the following:
You need to determine the optimal ratio between the creative budget relative to the media budget. This is the creative media ratio. It is simply the level of budget you attribute to creative versus your media spent. It can help you maximize the support you can offer each activity and a lot of the time ensuring you’re not only investing in creative work that won’t receive enough paid through support or paid support.
If you’re building a creative, you need to make sure you maximize the reach. Monitoring your creative media ratio enables you to determine if you’re spending way too much or too little on the creative or media. Typically speaking, there is no right formula for what that ratio should look like. Traditional marketing functions have tended to go for an 80:20 split between creative and media. However, when you think about the digital disruption that’s currently taking place, that ratio may well be a bit imbalanced in today’s context.
In the creative budgeting space, do not underestimate the amount of time and effort that goes in to developing creative assets. Time, effort, and money are just some of the key pillars that actually need to be considered when thinking about the creative approach. The costs include copywriters, art directors, creative personnel, and so on. And these are often expensive individuals, given the talent that they bring.
And if you think about spending more than 50% of your budget on creative, that could negatively impact performance. Again, consider the creative media ratio.
It's important to think about some of the resources for digital communications, particularly from an in-house digital marketing perspective. This is because largely it’s a fixed cost that you must consider, and it’s one that your department would have spent anyway.
You need to bear in mind three key things when thinking about in-house resources:
When thinking about the resources required, reflect on the structure in which a digital organization will take shape. Now largely speaking, organizations have put digital into a silo. In reality, and moving forward, it’s going to become much more of a mainstream part of any marketing base function and the structure must reflect this. So we must think about digital marketers being proficient in a variety of different ways, analytics, customer behavior, and channels. That then feeds into the traditional marketing approaches that are then taken. From a resource and budgeting perspective, marketing then starts to take on a much more all-encompassing role than it ever did before in the mix of an organization.
You need to think about how you develop your in-house social media monitoring. It’s essential that you give a broad spectrum of individual access to social media monitoring across the organization. You can get surefire, quick insights about your customers on a fairly regular basis, which allows you to iterate your approach pretty much instantaneously.
Bear in mind the following when thinking about your in-house social media monitoring approach:
Ritchie Mehta has had an eight-year corporate career with a number of leading organizations such as HSBC, RBS, and Direct Line Group. He then went on setting up a number of businesses.
Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:
The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful.
You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library
You will not be assessed on this content in your final exam.
ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module begins by covering the benefits and challenges associated with digital communications and the importance of researching and selecting the most appropriate digital channels to reach and engage with your target audience. It covers the tools and digital PR activities you can use to extend your reach on social media, content management, the factors to consider when creating a budget for a digital campaign, resourcing a digital team, and the importance of aligning digital metrics with customer service metrics to review the performance of a digital campaign.