Clients! Share your Digital Marketing budget with Agency

Hi! One of my roles at Paarami includes business development.

As part of this, I happen to meet many clients and pitch our digital marketing services to them. Digital marketing is picking up in India. Though in a nascent phase, businessmen have started realizing its benefits over traditional marketing. Clients listen to us attentively, get convinced that yes digital marketing would work for them and there comes the real hiccup!

After initial talks, we ask them for their digital marketing budget. And clients get so awkward by this question as if we have asked a lady for her age. Clients often find it embarrassing when asked for the budget when that is never the intention.

But my meeting last week with the brand manager of a Tours and travels company was a pleasant surprise.

Even before the discussion started, while giving the requirement brief she upfront shared the budget assigned for the marketing and the maximum spend that the company will allow spending on the digital activity.

Now this is something “unusual” but always a “must” information that digital marketing companies expect from the client in the proposal phase.

Immediately my mind started thinking how we can achieve the max ROI for this client in the given budget. Which channels to use – Paid & Search Marketing, SEO, Facebook Marketing or Email Marketing. It became my project rather than someone else’s.

Immediately, I spoke to a couple of influential bloggers from the travel industry and signed a deal with some of them to display banner ads on their high traffic blog websites. This is going to be cheaper than what I would spend on Google and FB advertisements. I spoke to PR agencies who can support us in this project to get required visibility. Now this was possible only because we had the idea of the budget. It created a sense of belonging and more importantly also helped in planning different activities.

When the budget is not shared by the client, the digital marketing agency ends up putting all the efforts preparing a plan. Once the agency shares the plan, the client discloses that the budget is only 20% of what the agency has assumed and prepared a plan for. The agency loses the interest. It’s like shooting in the dark.

What if you don’t know how much budget to assign?

This is highly possible when you are working on digital marketing for the first time. No worries! Assign a learning budget. This should be monthly at least 50K – 1L. This will have an agency share and some part will be spent on paid (ppc) promotion. Initial spend will help you gather data of what is working and what is not. You will get a good idea about results you can expect and how to extrapolate these spending over a period of time.

This article is a salute to all the clients who believe in the agency’s credibility and help them plan better and more importantly share the required information with them.

Let us know if you have any queries on digital marketing or its budget allocation. Contact us here.

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