As of the time of writing, it's November 2024. At BizzyWeb, we just finished our yearly budgeting planning - I'm guessing your organization is probably setting your budgets right now as well. That makes right now the time to plan what you're going to do for marketing in 2025 and how much money to invest toward driving new business.
I was going to host a webinar for BizzyWeb last month on this exact topic, but had to cancel at the very last second for a family emergency. Dave and Trygve stepped in and I'm so grateful, but I'm also disappointed because I spent days pulling together research and creating (what I thought was) a fantastic presentation! While I couldn't be there for the webinar, I can still put it all to good use here in this blog.
2025 is quickly and yet so slowly approaching - so here's what you need to know to start planning your marketing.
Marketing Strategy Planning
Before we cover the fun stuff (budgeting), first you need to be strategic. This advice is primarily for your digital marketing efforts, but many of these same practices will also work for print and event marketing.
If you missed it last week - Dave covered a ton of the specific trends we expect to see in 2025. I'd recommend checking out that blog as well, for some more specific examples of how to do my suggestions below: 2025 Marketing Trends You Can't Ignore.
1. Quality Over Quantity
If you only take one thing away from this blog, make it this: in 2025, less is more. Sorry to say it, but the internet and Google are getting old. The internet was invented in 1983 and Google went live in 1998. That means in 2025 they'll be 42 and 27, respectively. Think about the sheer amount of content that's been produced that Google has to sort through. With generative AI tools, even more content is being published. It's harder than ever to stand out.
That's why Google's algorithm prioritizes quality over quantity. It's much better to write only one really good blog post every 3 months instead of 3 low-quality blog posts each month. Why? It has to do with Google's E-E-A-T guidelines:
- Experience - Firsthand experience with a product, service, or methodology. The most common example is reviews.
- Expertise - The credentials and knowledge of the author of a piece of content. A blog from the Mayo Clinic about a disorder will be given more credence in the rankings than a blog from a layperson on the same disorder.
- Authoritativeness - The reputation of the author in their industry. This often goes hand-in-hand with expertise, but not necessarily.
- Trustworthiness - The accuracy and transparency of the content itself. This includes compliance with privacy laws on the website itself as well.
While these specific guidelines were written by Google, they apply to other search engines and social media sites as well. They also align with how users consume content.
Related Content: How to Adapt Your Content for Google's Search Generative Experience
2. Narrow Your Focus to Key Channels
Along with the less is more approach to content, being intentional about the channels you use to distribute that content is vital as well. Just a few years ago, it was best practice to be everywhere you could online. Now, users are retreating more and more into their niche. You don't have endless time in the day, and you'll see much better results if you spend that time focusing on only a few key channels instead of spreading your message far and wide.
The specific channels you choose will depend on your target audience. If it's been a while since you've revisited your ideal buyer personas, take this as your sign to do it right now. Buyer personas are fictionalized representations of your real customers created through a lot of research. Their time-consuming, but they've never been more important to get right than now.
Think about your internet use - are you running around to every single social media site, search engine, and forum that exists every single day? Unless you've unlocked the secret to getting 48 hours in one day (if so, please let me know how), you're probably spending time on specific channels.
You need to identify what channels your specific buyers spend their time on, and customize your content for each platform. A video about the same topic is very different on YouTube vs. TikTok, and not just the runtime. It's all about speaking your customers' language.
Related Content: Customer Journey Map Template
3. Do an Annual Content Audit
This is the final "less is more" section (I told you that was going to be important in 2025!). We have to talk about the content on your website. All your pages, blog posts, events, job listings, and whatever else is published for your audience. The natural progression of content production is to stack new content on top of old - but over time, this creates a messy web that might negatively impact your rankings in search engines.
You need to start doing content audits if you're not, and you need to do them more frequently if you already are. The easiest way to do a content audit is through a spreadsheet. We have a free template you can use, that you can find on our resources page.
Start by listing everything that's live on your site right now. Most often, the easiest way to do this is to log into the backend of your site because that will show you everything (including pages that aren't linked in your main navigation). If you have a lot of pages on your site, look for a "site crawler" tool or an "XML sitemap extractor" tool - either one will scrape your site and show you what's live. If you use HubSpot, you can do this automatically (follow these directions in their knowledge base). If you're one of our clients, email me or your account rep - we can scrape your site for you.
Then, you'll want to organize your findings. I recommend sorting by type of content first - page, blog post, event listing, etc. And then, you'll want to look for a few things:
- Do the pages on our site match our current services?
- Does our blog content line up with our service pages? (e.g. If you have a service page for "Digital Marketing" do you have blogs about that same topic)
- Where are there gaps that we can seize?
This will give you a jumping-off point of where to focus. You might need to remove outdated content, combine too-similar content, and update old content on your site. I recommend following a topic cluster strategy if you want to get strategic. I could talk about just that for days. HubSpot has a fantastic guide on how to do that here: Topic Clusters: The Next Evolution of SEO.
Related Content: Content Audit Template
4. Use SMART Goals
The previous strategic work involves a ton of research and planning. Now you have to translate that into something you can actually measure. This is where SMART goals come in. A SMART goal stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
These goals break up your larger organizational goals into smaller goals you can measure. Your overall goal may be "increase revenue" but that's extremely broad. One SMART goal that works toward that overall goal of increasing revenue might be: Increase the number of monthly sales qualified leads by 2% starting in January 2025 by creating personalized landing pages for each of our buyer personas.
We have a free SMART goals template on our resources page that you can use to generate your own. This template starts with your broad organizational goals and walks you through the steps to make it specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Related Content: Smart Goals Template
5. Set KPIs for Every Effort - Then Measure, Measure, Measure
Goals are great - but they're useless if you have no way to track goal progress. Each of your marketing efforts should have specific KPIs. When setting KPIs, I recommend looking at your past performance as well as industry averages so that you can create realistic KPIs. If you're looking for specific industry KPIs, I recommend starting with these three resources:
- HubSpot's list of marketing statistics for 2024
- FirstPageSage's marketing analytics statistics
- DataBox's Website Traffic Benchmarks
The specific KPIs you'll want to track will depend on the specific marketing effort. HubSpot has a fantastic in-depth guide for setting digital marketing KPIs: What is a KPI? How To Choose the Best KPIs for Your Business.
Budgeting
Now we get to the fun part - how much do you invest in your marketing? As a marketing manager, my obvious answer is:
Unfortunately, this isn't realistic for me. Instead, follow these guidelines when allocating your marketing budget.
General Budgeting Guidelines
Generally speaking, these are the recommended budgeting guidelines for businesses:
- Small business: 7-8% of annual revenue
- Mid-sized business: 10% of annual revenue
- Enterprise businesses: 15% of annual revenue
Now, these numbers may seem high. These are based on what's needed for large-scale growth year over year. Something you can try as well is incremental percentages. An example is if your 2024 revenue is projected to be $10 million and you want your 2025 revenue to be $12 million: start with budgeting 10% of $2 million as your desired increase.
These numbers aren't set in stone - you may need to make marketing spend adjustments to help meet your goals. If you want some guidance on setting a marketing budget, contact us and we can help.
Allocating Your Budget
Once you've set your budget, you have to decide how to allocate it. A general rule of thumb is:
- 70% on what's already working well
- 20% to explore new opportunities
- 10% set aside as a buffer for unknown opportunities
A quick note - "what's working well" doesn't mean "keep doing the exact same thing." If organic is doing fantastic for you, I don't recommend that you follow the same exact tactics you did last year. This will not keep you competitive. The tactics you undertake will be determined by the strategy you develop (which should hopefully be based on my suggestions in this blog!). But if a current avenue is successful, there's no reason to abandon it entirely for the newest toy.
Setting your marketing budget isn't easy. At BizzyWeb, it takes us several days of meetings with our department leads, a lot of arguing (mostly friendly), data, and research to finally hammer out what our own marketing budget will be in 2025. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, you're not alone. But I hope that the tips in this article will help you create a concrete, evidence-backed plan that will generate your desired results in 2025.
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BizzyWeb is a Minneapolis-based digital marketing and web design agency that helps companies get the high-quality leads they need to grow and thrive. Our tactics include inbound marketing, SEO, advertising, web design, content creation and sales automation. We are an accredited HubSpot Platinum Partner and we offer full-service HubSpot onboarding, enablement and strategy for new and current users.
