You should be well underway with developing a marketing budget and plan for 2010. If you wait much longer, your marketing efforts will be delayed and you could miss out on a strong start to a new year.

Consider what typically goes into a marketing cycle:

1. Establish marketing strategy
2. Identify marketing objectives
3. Define target audience
4. Research media options
5. Conceive campaigns
6. Calculate costs
7. Craft messaging
8. Gain executive endorsement and marketing funds
9. Execute campaigns
10. Measure effectiveness
11. Refine tactics

That’s a lot of work. And steps 1-8 all need to be completed before you gain any market presence.

Build Your Marketing Budget

We all know budgets can shift at any time, but you need to establish a marketing budget for 2010 to be used as a guide for your initial investments. Many managers struggle with developing a marketing budget because there is no single right way to do it.

Here are three methods that can work:

• Use the current year’s budget as a guideline and adjust up or down based on changes in strategy and results of last year’s programs.
• Allocate a percentage of expected revenue to marketing. This percentage can vary widely, depending on how well established you are in your target markets and whether you are planning to go after new markets or customer segments. Typical B2B marketing budgets are often between 4-8% of revenue. Model several different revenue scenarios, such as best case, likely case and worst case, and build a marketing plan for each scenario.
• Build your budget from the ground up based on your marketing strategy and objectives. This is the hardest route to go, yet also the purest. It also delivers a budget that is way above what you will actually spend. You’ll have to make intelligent decisions about where to cut.