Marketing & Advertising Spend In The UK In 2024

When determining your marketing budget, several crucial factors come into play.

Marketing spans a wide and diverse mix including branding, website design & development, communications and sales.  Marketing requires meticulous consideration for a comprehensive and effective strategy.

Branding Overview

Building a brand is not exclusive to large corporations; it is the cornerstone of every business, irrespective of size or industry.

Your brand serves as the initial impression, a fusion of visual creatives and concepts representing your offerings and the language used to communicate them.

From logo design to sales copy, every element shapes your unique brand identity! A robust brand instills credibility, while an underdeveloped one, may evoke doubt. Remember, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” Does your brand convey professionalism or does it look unprofessional and suggest a low-budget and disorganized image? Is your branding and creative style and concepts, targeting your EXACT target audience? Branding is all about perceptions and connotations. If you look cheap? Your customers will want to remunerate you in the same way. If you’re targeting higher socio demographics and your logo is for example an animation or cartoon style – does that really reflect your target audience? Or does it make you look like your targeting school children or a fun fair?

Branding And Spend

Initiate with a professionally designed logo, a defined colour palette,font family, unique photos, or carefully selected stock images, coupled with well-crafted sales copy. While tracking the ROI of branding efforts might be challenging, consider it an investment enhancing the effectiveness of your entire marketing strategy. Allocate between £1,000 to £5,000 for initial branding and additional funds for ongoing updates. A worthwhile investment is brand guidelines we have a lot of clients think this is a waste of money. They are wrong! Invest in this at the outset and you will never go wrong. Graphic designers, signage and livery, any creatives commissioned, must all follow the same rules re layouts as outlined in your brand guidelines.

Advertising Overview

Any activity directly promoting your business to prospects falls under advertising. This encompasses various channels such as Google Search, Google Display, Online Video ads On YouTube and other social media networks including ads, email campaigns, direct mail, billboards, radio spots, or networking events. Your advertising budget should encompass content creation and campaign management costs.

Advertising Spend

Set two budgets: one for sustaining current revenues and another for robust growth. Allocate 5-10% of sales for maintaining current revenues, while for rapid growth, consider 20% or more, depending on your industry. Start ups can commit to a fixed advertising spend; £1,000 per month is a reasonable minimum for many small businesses.

Communications

Consider communications as “marketing insurance.” Streamline prospect connections and prioritise personal correspondence to manage leads effectively. Neglecting communication systems can waste advertising investments and lead to poor customer service.  A local chain of hotels cannot seem to get their phone working correctly as they should. That is bound to be bad for business. Ensure the basics ie phone lines with a land line that looks much more professional plus easier to remember if you see it on livery or signage or flyers etc. Mobile phones should have personalised answer machine messages, emails a signature with contact info. Try your best not to waste your prospective customers time trying to find ways to open up communications and engage with your brand.

Communication Spend

Invest according to your industry’s needs to ensure responsiveness and avoid losing leads. Effective communication is critical, and poor service can result in refund requests from new customers.

Sales

Sales, under the marketing umbrella, is the crucial phase where prospects transition to customers. Develop professional sales presentations or methods that highlight the benefits of your offerings.  Have an elevator pitch ready. Don’t be scared to sell! Every business owner is a salesperson you have to be or you’ll go out of business. Some people don’t have the time or dread the thought of cold calling (B2B) or pitching their product/services in a group setting. Try to step out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself.  If you’re passionate about your product you should be able to ad-lib without notes when public speaking. If the thought fills you with fear and dread, fear not. Corrie D Marketing can help we offer a telesales and reps visit service we can white label on behalf of your company or we can simply explain we’re working in partnership with your brand and can offer tele marketing services to your clients or we can also provide databases for any sector, any town/city worlwide.

Sales Spend

Invest in sales tools, graphic design presentations, videos, and media to enhance sales results. If you have a sales team, ensure they are well-equipped, dressed professionally, polite, knowledgeable, and capable of clearly communicating your products or services.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Summarize your marketing spend with the customer acquisition cost (CAC), representing the total cost to acquire one new customer. Regularly evaluate and work to lower your CAC without compromising your brand. Also a few other good to know figures are the Life Time Value (LTV) of a customer. So lets say for example you are eg a hairdresser with a beauticians – it’s the lifetime value of each new client that comes in the door and what it’s worth to your brand.  ROAS s another important factor Return On Ad Spend or also known as ROI Return On Investment.

Conclusion

A well-crafted marketing plan can be a game-changer for your company, propelling it to new heights. Starving your business of essential marketing components is never a wise decision. Instead, focus on refining your marketing effectiveness to ensure sustained growth and profitability. I always explain if you have a B&B but dont advertise it? You only have a house. Also during challenging times marketing spend is usually the first budget cut. If you advertise when your busy – When times are tough the troughs won’t be as low as they could be. If you stop advertising when things are quiet you are making a big mistake, to ensure momentum, advertising should be a continuous and ongoing commitment.

Remember advertising, marketing etc is a moving target. And ever changing fast landscape to navigate. Try and test is our motto spend where it works, trial and error try it, test, monitor your feedback and every enquiry ie ask everyone that contacts your business, how they heard about you? Monitor all enquiries, the most important advice is to be flexible.