Your website is without a doubt the most important marketing tool at your disposal. More often than not, your website is the first touch point a potential customer has with your company. Their online experience influences whether or not they want to invest in your product or service. It’s vital to keep your company’s website up-to-date to attract visitors. But maintaining a website isn’t free. Without an adequate budget dedicated to marketing, your website isn’t at its full potential. But what if your leadership team doesn’t see the value in raising the marketing budget? How can you convince them that investing in marketing is the most effective thing you can do to attract more consumers?
What Is Your Website Lacking?
If management believes that your current budget is serving you well, you can’t expect them to go wild at the prospect of throwing more money into your website. So you’ll have to be able to show them that this is not the case; there is room to improve. So, when making the case against your current strategies, where do you begin?
Your first step has to be collecting data. How could you make the case that your current marketing strategies aren’t working if you don’t have the facts to back up your claims? Ideally, you are already tracking visits, conversions, and customers, but if you aren’t then it’s time to start. You can collect ample data within 3 to 6 months.
You also need to start doing some research into your competitors. What are they doing that you are not? You can do this yourself by visiting their websites to collect the data. The chart below is a good basic tool to guide you in your data collection.
| Your Company | Competitor 1 | Competitor 2 | Competitor 3 | Competitor 4 | |
| Do they have a blog? | |||||
| Are they using analytics? | |||||
| # of Twitter Followers | |||||
| Facebook Fans | |||||
| LinkedIn Followers | |||||
| Marketing Automation | |||||
| Marketing Grade | |||||
| Traffic Rank | |||||
| Linking Domains | |||||
| MozRank | |||||
| Revenue |
The numbers don’t lie. This data is a great way to prove to your leadership team that your current marketing strategies just aren’t performing as well as they could be. Convincing them of this fact is the first step to increasing your budget.
How has website marketing changed?
It’s great to be able to show your team what you are missing out on, but how can they know that a change in budget will help with these issues? After all, traditional internet marketing tends to go from project to project. Your company pays a large fee, gets a website update, then waits for the site to become outdated so that the process can repeat. How will investing more money change the process?
It is important to note that the process has changed. You no longer spend large (often unexpected) sums of money and time on a soon-to-be outdated project. Now, it makes far more sense to use a retainer model. Your company will pay a marketing agency a monthly fee to ensure that your website is always up-to-date. This means that someone will always be paying attention to your marketing needs. They’ll work to attract visitors and guide them down the marketing funnel. The great news? Monthly payments are much easier to budget than unpredictable large-scale updates!
What if my team isn’t sold?
It’s no easy feat to convince a management team to invest more into a marketing budget if they don’t believe in. Maybe they think you’re doing okay or have had bad experiences with internet marketing companies in the past. If you feeling a little outnumbered, download our free ebook on how to convince your team that it’s time for a change.
