10 tips on marketing budgets
We’re at that time of year when organisations are planning their budgets for the next financial year, so I’ve put together some tips about marketing budgets aimed at heritage and cultural organisations.
1. Consider marketing at the outset
Don’t let marketing be an afterthought. It is most powerful and effective when considered strategically and incorporated into your organisational planning.
2. Do what’s right for your organisation
There’s no right or wrong or universal formula on how much to spend on marketing, it’s dependent on so many different factors. For private sector organisations 7-10% of revenue is often cited as a common spend, whilst start-ups will typically spend less (2-3%). B2C companies typically spend a higher proportion of their revenue on marketing than B2B companies, especially when it comes to consumer packaged goods (where it can be 20-30% of revenue). I haven’t seen any definitive research on marketing spending in the culture and heritage sectors but research by PR Week on charities’ spending on communications back in 2017 showed charities with less than £500,000 income per year spent on average up to 0.8% on comms (excluding staff salaries), increasing to 3% as income grew, before dropping back down again to 2% (perhaps due to economies of scale). The Arts Marketing Association’s Benchmarking Survey in 2019 (member only resource) found that the marketing team of arts and cultural organisations tends to be ca. 10% of the total number of employees.
3. Prioritise
Drill down and focus on what’s important to your organisation. Consider what can you achieve without budget, and what is hard to achieve without it. Don’t take a scattergun approach and don’t spread yourself too thinly. Many organisations have switched to a digital-only approach during the pandemic with clear advantages in terms of cost savings; sustainability; speed and flexibility; and analytics. But are there audiences that still rely on non-digital communications channels you need to reach?
4. Have clear goals and objectives
Set clear goals and ideally SMART objectives about what you want to achieve (I’m doing a future post about this). This will inform your approach and help you stay on track.
5. Monitor and evaluate
Having SMART objectives makes monitoring and evaluation much easier. Keep an eye on things as they go, don’t just wait until the end of a project or year to look at the data. Ensure you have ways of capturing the data and information you need. Chances are that you will already have access to a lot, for example looking at where traffic is coming from to your website; social media ad analytics; visitor surveys. Make sure you use the data to inform future decisions and plans.
6. Think investment (not spend)
Ok, so this is reminiscent of my PR agency days and discussions around semantics for public sector news releases… But I do think that framing the spend on marketing as an investment helps make the link with a return. Your budget should be creating value, whether that’s financial, reputational or something else.
7. Include in funding applications
So often I’ve seen massive funding applications and successful projects with barely any request for marketing budget. Perhaps from a belief that funders would rather money goes on buildings, collections and activities themselves; perhaps due to an assumption that projects will automatically generate interest without any marketing effort; or due to not knowing how much to spend and on what. But “Build it and they will come” isn’t true and marketing is a legitimate, valuable and vital way of helping you achieve your aims – for example around growing and broadening audiences, increasing income and hitting fundraising targets.
8. Consider longer-term value
And linked to that, consider what you can invest in that will create value repeatedly and/or over time. Advertising can be incredibly effective but typically when you stop paying for it, the results stop. So consider investing in areas where you’ll reap the benefits even once the budget is spent. For example:
marketing training for staff and volunteers (membership of the Arts Marketing Association is excellent value, giving you access to loads of brilliant webinars) to upskill your team)
strong photography and films that you can roll out across different channels over time (plan ahead and stage a range of seasonal and event photos in one day)
technology or software to professionalise operations (for example a ring light, a microphone, a subscription to a social media management system).
9. Partnerships and piggybacks
Your money may be able to go further if you partner up with other organisations, for example in local tourism campaigns. Just make sure you’re clear on what you want to achieve, everyone’s responsibilities and how you will evaluate your involvement and investment.
10. Be realistic about your time
If you’re lucky enough to have some budget to invest in marketing, you will still need to allocate time as well. Even if you use your budget to outsource activities to a freelancer or consultant, they will need to be briefed by you, get sign-off, have their invoices paid etc. Another example is Google Ad Grants – the $10,000 per month they will gift non-profits to spend on Google search ads sounds tempting. But you need to know what you’re doing and will need to spend a fair amount of time on it each month, unless you pay to outsource the management of it. One Further have written an article explaining more about this.
No budget at all? Don’t despair
A lot can still be achieved with no marketing budget at all. But then you really will need to be prepared to invest more time – for example in creating excellent organic social media content or crafting newsworthy media releases and photo opportunities. Arts Council England’s Digital Culture Network has a great range of free resources and training webinars you can learn from, and the Arts Marketing Association’s Culture Hive is a huge free online resource hub on all things arts marketing.
Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash