For those looking for a sample marketing budget excel sheet, I thought I would include one in this post. This sample marketing budget excel sheet includes a graph and pie-chart that breaks down a fictitious company’s expenditures in the first quarter of its fiscal year.
Of particular importance is how the company’s marketing expenditures are expressed as a percentage of sales within the attached sample excel sheet. Tracking marketing expenditures is an essential part of identifying those marketing plans that help to increase the company's marketing ROI.
Sample Marketing Budget Sheet
In our sample budget the company has pursued a mixture of inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing relies upon being searched by customers online. Its focus is to drive potential customers and traffic to a company's website by engaging in several online advertising campaigns, all in the aim of increasing the website's PageRank in search engines; the higher the PageRank, the higher the traffic.
Inbound marketing is less expensive, more accurate in terms of defining a company's costs of leads, and it allows companies to access a much wider audience at a much lower cost than outbound strategies.
Outbound marketing is a more recognized marketing platform, one built upon advertising through magazines, direct mail campaigns, flyers, TV, newspapers and radio. While outbound marketing is seen as more expensive, and more difficult to track the costs of qualified leads, it is seen as a more recognized, and sometimes a more relevant form of marketing. This is especially the case with certain age demographics within today's consumers.
Breaking Down the Marketing Budget
This first portion of our sample marketing budget itemizes a company’s first quarter marketing expenditures through January, February and March. It provides totals for each and every marketing initiative in each month, as well as a total for the entire quarter. They've combined online advertising with conventional print, radio and magazine advertisements. In addition, they've also accounted for their expenditures on training their sales force and the costs of attending trade shows and conferences.
The table below shows the amount spent by the company on marketing in its first quarter, the company's sales totals in its first quarter and uses both to express its marketing as a percentage of sales. This is done by taking the “total spent marketing in Q1” and dividing it by that quarter’s “company sales totals in Q1”.
- marketing as a percentage of sales: $38,100.00 divided by $1,200,000.00 = 3.175%
The second portion of the sample budget includes a month by month comparison of expenditures in marketing.
The third portion of the sample marketing budget excel sheet provides a total of the percentages of those aforementioned marketing initiatives. The sum of all the marketing expenditures equals 100% and the excel sheet calculates this by taking the marketing initiative“Q1 Totals” and dividing it by the “total spent marketing in Q1”.For example, the on-line advertising totals for Q1 included $3,000.00 spent - $1,000.00 in January, $1,000.00 February & $1,000.00 in March. The percentage of the total marketing expenditures is simply the $3,000.00 (total for Q1) divided by the “total spent marketing in Q1” of $36,050.00, which equals 8%. This 8% is then shown as the first line item of the “total marketing expenditures expressed in %”below.
Finally, the sample marketing budget excel sheet has the marketing expenditures displayed in a pie-chart, with a legend of each and ever marketing initiative as well as the corresponding percentages they represent.
Your marketing budget is meant to track your monthly, quarterly and yearly expenditures across multiple marketing campaigns and strategies. However, the budget can only define the expenditures on each campaign; it can't define your company's costs of leads, costs of customer acquisition and costs of customer retention.
If you want to learn how to measure the results of a given marketing initiative, and to better understand how your company can determine its costs of leads, please read: Does Your Business Know How Much it Costs to Get a New Customer?.
This aforementioned post discusses why it’s important for companies to determine their cost of customers and how marketing can not only help determine those costs, but also lower them.
It is similar to this sample marketing budget excel sheet, but it differs in that it helps companies to define what their costs are of finding qualified leads in marketing.
If you want to download the sample marketing budget excel sheet, you can do so here: Download Sample Marketing Budget Excel Sheet Graph & Pie-Chart of Expenditures
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