Start your marketing plan by setting your budget first. The budget determines how you split money across channels like Meta ads, Google PPC, sponsorships, and SEO. Brainstorming ideas without knowing what you can spend wastes time.
When you're creating a marketing plan, we have to establish our budget because budget informs allocation. Here's what I mean by that. You don't want to necessarily come up with all of the ideas. Let's just say you sat around a boardroom table or conference table with your team and everybody starts throwing ideas out about where we should spend our marketing dollars. Well, let's throw some money to Meta. Let's do some local field marketing. With activations locally. Let's go to baseball games. Let's do things on Google PPC. Let's spend some money on Google LSA. How about some SEO work that we can do? So on and so on and so forth. We don't start there because we want the budget to— our budget to inform the allocation. Because at the end of the day, you're only going to have so big of a budget to operate off of. And so once you know the budget, then you can make sure that you're putting money putting enough dollars towards certain allocations.
