No business exists in a vacuum so it's paramount to know what your competitors and others in your industry are doing in terms of products, services, and marketing.
When it comes to “Keeping up with the Joneses” – translation for the Millennials: “Keeping up with the Kardashians”! – it really pays to understand the current marketing trends because, let’s face it, an unlimited marketing budget is about as realistic as grabbing lunch next week with Kim, Khloe and Kourtney.
“In an ideal world, marketers would have limitless budgets to invest in experimental initiatives and new programs. After all, the customer acquisition and retention landscape are evolving faster than ever,” writes Flori Needle for HubSpot. “The challenge, however, is that marketing budgets are often limited around what's proven to work — which tends to look different from company to company.”
The good news is that your company likely has some more marketing dollars to seed your campaigns in 2022.
As U.S. businesses continue their recovery from the global pandemic marketing spending, especially for digital marketing, is set to soar.
“Digital marketing transformations have continued alongside the global pandemic,” said the latest CMO Survey in August.
That survey found that, after some marketing budget retraction in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis, a big rebound:
Marketing leaders are driving digital transformation in the vast majority of companies as they report moving past a nascent phase of digital transformation (8.6 percent currently vs. 31.1 percent a year ago) into emerging (53.1 percent), integrated (26.9 percent) and institutionalized (11.4 percent) phases.
The rules and strategies are being rewritten quickly and marketers need to keep up with the latest trends to stay relevant.
“Gone are the days when you could just have a standard website, pay for Google ads, and expect potential clients to come your way. The content marketing trends for 2022 are far more nuanced, involving relevance and precision.” Laura Kraus at Rellify.
Just how much should you spend on marketing is a question that will be answered differently for each company given its unique situation and circumstances.
There are, however, some rules of thumb.
The Small Business Administration says that "as a general rule, small businesses with revenue less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing.”
WordStream recommends that new businesses, under five years, should allocate 12 to 20 percent of gross revenue to marketing while established companies should allocate 6 to 12 percent.
Remember, that for your company’s unique position, it is all about what is right for your ideal consumer or client.
“If everyone could ask what’s right for the consumer, [the industry] would be better. We’ve over-complicated the model versus setting industry standards as we build,” said a Brand Marketing Leader in PWC and IAB’s “Outlook 2022: The US Digital Advertising Ecosystem”
Of course, you want to allocate those marketing dollars to achieve the biggest return on investment. And that is where it helps to know what other marketing leaders are investing in this year.
One of the great things about HubSpot is that they have their finger on the industry pulse and their research can help you plan your 2022 marketing strategy.
“That's why it's so important to have access to industry data. By knowing where we stand against our peers and competitors, we're better positioned to uncover areas of opportunity,” writes HubSpot’s Needle.
HubSpot thinks nearly 50 percent of marketers will see their budget increase in 2022 and this is where the experts say their marketing dollars will go towards: