Establish an Optimal Marketing Budget for Your Language School

To succeed in today’s competitive marketplace, you must develop a marketing strategy that is both dynamic and cohesive in its execution. Online marketing is the process of introducing and promoting products and services to prospective customers. Your potential customers will not learn about your products and services if you do not implement dynamic online marketing strategies, and the growth of your business will be hampered as a result of this failure.

Budget for Digital Marketing

If you want to expand your brand, increase sales, and grow your business as quickly as possible, you must put money into your marketing in order to achieve these results.

You must make a financial investment in digital marketing. Your company’s presence in the online world should be highly visible.

Why?

Because your potential customers have moved their business to the internet. This is the location where they are actively looking for products and services to purchase.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that refers to the process of optimizing a website for search engines.

Your potential customers use search engines on a regular basis, and 91% of them do so frequently. This explains why 94 percent of businesses rank SEO as the most important source of leads, with the importance of SEO growing over time.

Is it possible for people to find you on search engines?

Local search has increased by 300 percent, going from 1 billion searches to 4 billion searches. Local searches on smartphones result in 78 percent of purchases, and searches on tablets result in 77 percent of purchases. Your potential customers are now using their mobile devices to search for local businesses and make purchases while on the go, so be prepared!

Is your website prepared to accept mobile payments?

Is your website compatible with mobile devices? Following the implementation of a mobile-friendly website, 62 percent of businesses reported an increase in sales. Sales of e-commerce products reached $133 billion and are expected to reach $626 billion by 2021.

Optimization of social media platforms

Your customers are spending one out of every six minutes online on social media platforms. Do you have a social media presence on sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and other social media platforms?

Do it yourself or hire a professional to do it for you?

Yes, you can complete all of your tasks at the same time. All the way down to online marketing—web design, search engine optimization (SEO), local optimization (Local), social media, pay-per-click management (PPC), online reputation management (ORM), and more—we can help you with all aspects of your business.

Take Action Immediately or Your Competitors Will Destroy You.

Online marketing is already being practiced by many of your competitors. They already have a website that is mobile-friendly. They are utilizing SEO, local marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and online reputation management. It is their intention to grow their brands through the creation, publication, and distribution of content.

Continuing to do exactly what they are already doing will not be of much assistance. Increasing your marketing efforts will allow you to outperform your competitors marketing efforts in the long run.

You must meticulously plan your marketing budget and delegate responsibility for your digital marketing to qualified professionals. This will allow you to concentrate on growing your business while maintaining your sanity and staying one step ahead of your competitors!

Budgets for marketing are being increased.

Successful businesses adjust their marketing budgets in response to market conditions. According to recent studies, 60 percent of businesses intend to increase their overall marketing budgets in the coming year. Budgets increased on average by 26 percent, with 73 percent of these businesses increasing their marketing budgets by 30 percent as a result.

According to the same research, 71 percent of businesses have increased their digital marketing budgets!

Marketing Budget Allocation: A Guideline for Beginners

It is recommended that you allocate at least 10% of your total annual gross revenue to your strategic marketing plan (or more). As a startup or when launching a new product or service, its recommended to invest up to 20 to 30 percent of your projected annual gross revenue to really make a splash and get the ball rolling. In some industries, actual marketing budgets can amount to as much as 35% of total revenue generation.

While some business owners believe that they do not need to implement strong digital marketing strategies in order to be successful (with some managing to maintain and even grow their revenues in the absence of a coherent digital marketing strategy), their customers are increasingly turning to the Internet to assist them in making purchasing decisions (see Figure 1). A further development is that, as mobile adoption continues to grow, an increasing number of consumers are turning to their mobile devices to assist them in making purchasing decisions.

If you want to make a profit in today’s marketplace, you must develop and implement strong multi-device and cross-channel digital marketing strategies that allow you to reach both potential and existing customers in the most effective way possible.

How Much of Your Marketing Budget Should You Allocate to Your School?

It is recommended that new businesses allocate at least 10 percent of their gross annual income to a strategic marketing action plan that includes appropriate online, print, and networking initiatives as a general rule of thumb. Businesses looking to advance their objectives and sales are advised to devote more time and money to developing a strategic marketing action plan, which could account for as much as 20-30 percent of their anticipated annual gross revenues, according to Entrepreneur magazine. This is especially true for businesses introducing new products or services.

This is not to say that these figures are set in stone. As recommended by the Small Business Administration of the United States, small businesses with annual revenues of less than $5 million should devote between 7-8 percent of their total revenues to marketing activities. This allocated budget should be divided between the costs of brand development and the costs of marketing and promoting the company.

As stated by the Small Business Administration of the United States, a small businesss allocated marketing budget should also take into consideration the industry in which the business operates, the size of the business, and the stage of the businesss growth. Its equally important how the marketing budget gets spent, and the budget should be used to outline the costs of the companys marketing goals over a specific time period.

Your competitors plan to increase their marketing expenditures.

As the economy continues to improve, an increasing number of marketers are announcing that they will be increasing their marketing budgets this year in order to fuel business growth in the coming months. This year’s Marketing Budgets Report, which was published by Econsultancy and sponsored by Responsys, found that 60 percent of client-side respondents expect to see an increase in their overall marketing budgets. 

When it comes to digital marketing budgets, the number of companies increasing their spending has remained remarkably consistent since 2009, with 71 percent of companies increasing their spending this year. In spite of the fact that more companies are relying on their digital channels to drive business growth as well as lead generation and sales conversions, digital budgets have largely been protected from spending cuts.

During the same period, only 20% of companies intend to increase their traditional (offline) marketing budgets in the coming year, with the remaining 55% intending to maintain their traditional (offline) marketing budgets in the coming year.

Acquisition marketing is the primary focus of your competitors.

According to the fifth annual Marketing Budgets Report, more companies anticipate focusing their marketing investments on acquiring new customers (acquisition marketing) rather than keeping their existing customers (engagement/retention) in 2014. Respondents say they are concentrating on acquisition marketing this year, an increase from 31 percent in 2013, while retention/engagement is down from 24 percent in 2013 to 18 percent this year.

The modest increase in acquisition marketing can be attributed in part to the improved economic climate and the corresponding increase in marketing budgets, which have both contributed to the increase.

Spending on marketing: Email marketing, social media, and search (SEO/PPC) are the most popular options.

The most recent StrongView survey, which was conducted in conjunction with SENSORPRO, looked at business leaders and their projected marketing budgets for the first time. This year, 52 percent of respondents intend to increase their expenditures on email marketing, 46 percent on social media, and 41 percent on search (SEO/PPC), according to the survey results.

Some traditional advertising channels, on the other hand, are seeing a significant decrease in expenditures over the last year. According to the results of the StrongView survey, 32 percent of respondents intend to reduce their print advertising expenditures, while 21 percent intend to reduce their direct mail expenditures.

One of the most significant challenges facing marketers this year is gaining access to and leveraging the massive amounts of data generated by an increasing number of marketing channels. Accessing and leveraging customer data was cited as the most difficult email marketing challenge by 40% of respondents while developing more relevant engagements was cited by 32% of respondents as the most difficult email marketing challenge.