A question we get asked a lot from clients is “how much should we be spending on digital media for our brand”.  Determining the right media budget for your brand is about finding the right balance between your business and your target markets – you don’t want to spend too little, so the media does not create enough effect and you also don’t want to over invest on certain media types. 

There is a couple of things you want to consider before putting down the number: 

Size of the market – you must know how big your target market is on each platform (like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Spotify Ads and YouTube Ad Formats), nowadays you can get accurate audience sizes based on your target markets to see where they spend their time.  Work intensely with these numbers to ensure you get things like reach and frequency right and find out which combination of mediums will have the highest reach at the lowest cost.  

Key things you want to achieve here: 

• Ensure your target markets are adequately covered in terms of timing, reach and frequency on the key platforms.  

• Make sure your target markets are specific and well defined, when target markets are big and vaguely defined it is almost impossible to achieve efficient reach, frequency, and engagement numbers.  

Competitor Activity – you can get a detailed report that will show you exactly what your competitors are advertising and where they are spending their media (per campaign and per platform).  Get the reports on your primary competitors and figure out what share of voice you want in your category and look for gaps and opportunities in their media strategy that your brand can capitalize on.  

Insert a report of ad check here.  

Key objectives here: 

• Make sure you know what your competitors are advertising, and how much are they spending where on digital platforms.  
• Decide if you want to compete against them (in the noise media strategy) or if you want to look for opportunities to reach people where your competitors are not active.  

Customer journey – always make sure you accommodate the entire customer journey when deciding on budgets. A lot of advertisers make the mistake of allocating media budgets to campaigns, but they don’t budget all the way for their target market after ad engagement.  Make sure you assign budget to the campaign, engagement and remarketing and marketing support strategies to ensure your media plan has the right intensity on all touchpoints for your target markets.  

Objectives – always take your business and your brands marketing objectives in mind. Different marketing objectives usually require different media budgets, for instance, if you want to launch a brand-new product to a target market you will need sufficient media coverage, whereas if you want to run engagement media in a market that previously engaged with your business it might only require an efficient amount of money.”