Step 7 — Develop Your Marketing Budget

Your marketing budget can be developed in several ways, depending on whether you want to be more exact or to develop just a quick-and-dirty number. It’s good to start out with a quick-and-dirty calculation and then to support it with further details.

 

First, if you have been in business for over a year and tracked your marketing-related expenditures, you could easily calculate your “cost to acquire one customer” or “cost to sell one product” by dividing your annual sales and marketing costs by the number of units sold (or customers acquired).

 

The next step is to take your cost to sell one unit or acquire one customer and simply multiply it by your unit sales or customer acquisition goal. The result of this simple computation will give you a rough estimate of what you need to invest to meet your sales goals for the next year.