What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.

 Have you thought about using surveys on your website to track where your visitors are coming from and how they heard about you. You can see a great example of this at Cravenplan

Surveys are also a great way to discover what your customers think of the service you are offering and it is amazing the insight you can get on what products they were hoping to find.

Using this information you can target your advertising to the right market and can make sure that you are stocking products that these visitors want to buy, this will increase conversion rates and you can make more money per visitor.

So who do you think your competitors are in your market, I am guessing that the answer you just gave is not who your actual competitors are.

Let me explain a little, you probably said that your competitors are the other people in your area who are selling the same thing as you, or the website that sells the same thing as you.

However when you are talking about on-line marketing this is not who your competitors are, your competitors are any website that ranks higher than you in the search engines for the terms that you need to rank for.

So it is possible that you are in competition with wikipedia and ebay, this is because to get your website and your products in front of your potential clients you need to be at the top of the search engines for the most relevant keywords.

How do you do this you may be asking, well the secret is good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) if you use good search engine optimisation and keyword research you can plan your march up the search engines and you can ensure that you are able to outrank your true competition at the top of the search engine rankings.