How to strategically manage your marketing spend with 8 integrated simple marketing budget templates

Setting strategic and channel direction, working toward commercial objectives and KPIs, and monitoring your success is great. But if you're not tracking your ROI per channel it's hard to understand how much money you've had to spend to see a return. That's why you need a practical, accessible marketing budget.

How much budget is allocated to marketing?

Did you know, as of Spring 2024, marketing accounts for 10.2% of overall budgets, and 10.1% of company revenues? In small businesses, with fewer than 50 employees, this rises to 16.9% of the budget for 22.7% of the revenue. Whereas those with over 10,000 employees allocate just 9.6% to marketing, to achieve 6.5% of revenue. The latest CMO survey found that yearly growth in marketing spending is predicted to rise 4.7% in 2024. Within this growing budget, digital marketing spending…

Using capability maturity models to audit your digital maturity and set targets to improve digital marketing effectiveness

We've been adding to our visual tools to help all members assess how well their businesses are adapting to using digital media and technology and to set targets to improve their results from digital marketing. [si_blog_banner_cta]

3 different types of benchmarking

We have collected these visuals together in a single download so that you can easily review them and print the most relevant for you. We've designed them So members can use them for different scales of business and roles. There are more than 10 templates which cover: Digital marketing for small and medium businesses using our RACE framework Digital transformation for larger businesses Digital channel marketing activities including SEO, Social media, email and content marketing You can see one example, which I designed for reviewing digital marketing effectiveness with senior leaders in small and medium…

15 practical examples of GPT-3/GPT-4 prompts to support content marketing, email marketing, search and social media marketing

In Part 1, of my review of marketing applications of Chat GPT,  I reviewed the quality of output and interactions of the GPT-3 Large Language Model (LLM) on which ChatGPT is trained by asking: How can I use ChatGPT for marketing? I showed how you can use ChatGPT for learning more about digital marketing and marketing planning by creating plans. In this article, I will explain some practical use cases of how marketers can use Chat GPT for content marketing to support different digital marketing channels. We'll see that knowing how to Prompt ChatGPT will be a key skill, so I'll show different Prompting techniques before reviewing specific applications for the different digital marketing channels. Some of the key digital marketing channels that I'll describe are summarised in this visual from my book Digital marketing:…

My example dialogues and use cases show the amazing opportunities for marketers from ChatGPT and other generative AI tools

I’ve been advising on digital marketing and new innovations for over 25 years. Since it was called Internet Marketing… This tends to make you super cynical as to new claims about marketing innovations. Over this time, many of the techniques for digital marketing and approaches to planning digital marketing strategies and campaigns have remained similar. Much Martech now promises to be be ‘AI-powered’ while still relying on manual analysis and customizations. In fact, I’d say that it’s the development of search and social media platforms that have been the main drivers of change. Until now, that is... Having tested ChatGPT, I believe it will spark mainstream adoption of AI amongst marketers, since it will be used as a practical tool to support creative development to help marketers working on search, email and social media…

Mapping the most effective AI technologies for marketing across the customer lifecycle in the coming year

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is a hot topic in marketing at the moment, with the huge interest in ChatGPT (see our articles on using ChatGPT for marketing). But AI is a broad term covering a wide range of different technologies, many of which have been available for some time. We originally wrote this article based on the opportunities for using AI for marketing in 2017 and have updated it since with examples. Artificial intelligence means any technology that seeks to mimic human intelligence, which covers a huge range of capabilities such as voice and image recognition, machine learning techniques and semantic search. That's why, in our AI and Machine Learning briefing for members, we have identified fifteen artificial intelligence techniques that businesses of all sizes can implement, rather than techniques that only major tech giants can devote…

Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - do you know your Hype Cycles?

If you're involved in marketing strategy development, you will be constantly making judgments and reviewing with colleagues which digital technology innovations are most relevant to your organization. The Gartner Hype Cycle, which is published each year is a good tool to use to find out about both newly emerging innovations and more established marketing technology that could be relevant. In this article, we compare different examples of the well-established Gartner Hype Cycle tools which serve to highlight the adoption of new technology services within marketing technology. Gartner publishes many different hype cycles reviewing the adoption curves for different types of technologies, but as a digital strategist, I am most interested in those focusing on digital marketing technologies. A summary of the report with the infographic is published annually and I have been monitoring them and sharing them for over…

Why agreeing on a policy for how AI is used in marketing is an essential part of the future marketing playbook for all businesses

ChatGPT has thrust Generative AI into prominence for marketers and many others whose activities involve content creation. Many have been ‘wowed’ by the power of this and similar tools for the speed of generating copy and content to save time. Yet time to produce content is only one part of effective content marketing. Without a policy for managing how AI is used by marketers within a business, we'll see that there are many risks that need to be controlled. It reminds me of a similar situation to fifteen plus years ago when social media marketing was first widely adopted. As its use evolved, it was often used on an ad hoc basis in different parts of a business and often by junior marketers or interns without the oversight…

5 Reasons to consider a life as a T-Shaped Marketer

Editor's note: We have updated this post, ten years after Simon Swan originally wrote it, to highlight what we have always felt is missing from the concept... the need for strategic marketing skills. The team at Smart Insights has created a new infographic to highlight these skills: The Strategic Digital Marketer. At their heart, the Strategic T-shaped marketer is someone who has excellent skills and experience in developing strategies that align digital marketing tactics and investment with the needs of the business. Contrast this with the original visuals shown below which focus solely on tactics. Don't get us wrong, these best practices are vital to success in modern always-on lifecycle marketing . However, to help unify digital marketing with the needs of the business and the customer, consideration…

Basic marketing principles may remain the same but the digital marketing skills and tools you need to thrive in the workplace are constantly evolving. How can tomorrow's digital marketers future proof their marketing skills?

Preparing for a job in the marketing world tomorrow will be vastly different than it is today. While the basics of marketing may be the same, the digital marketing skills and tools you need to analyze, create, and implement marketing campaigns continue to evolve at breakneck speed. If this seems overwhelming, don't worry, we have resources in place to help you. Why not start by reading up and finding out more about what digital marketing means today. Why are digital marketing skills important now? In the March 2023 CMO survey, 46.4% of respondents ranked 'labor/skills shortage' as their top- or second top-ranked challenge over the next 12 months. In other words, there’s a huge gap…

Practical ideas for you to use including how to use ChatGPT

Each year, for the last 10 years, or so, I have identified the latest trends in digital marketing and forecast what the major trends will be in the year ahead. The aim is to help marketers and business owners find new marketing ideas, review their budget investments and put together their plans. There’s always a lot of interest as businesses consider tactics they can deploy to gain an edge by using some of the latest techniques. This review covers the latest developments in digital marketing across the many digital marketing channels tools that businesses can use shown in the visual below based on our RACE digital marketing framework. I cover ChatGPT at the end of the article. We developed this to help businesses develop a robust approach to developing integrated digital marketing strategies across 25 key activities which we define as…