66 Ways to Allocate Your Marketing Budget – The Most Comprehensive List Ever!

A Checklist for What, How and Where Professional Service Firms Allocate Budget to Marketing Strategies and Tactics

The 4^th quarter is when a lot of accounting, consulting, law and recruiting firms create marketing plans and approve next year’s marketing budget. So, we thought it might be interesting to identify all of the different items that your firm may need to include in the budget.

We came up with 66 items. Don’t freak out.

We're not suggesting that you need to have all 66 (or more) of these items in your budget, but your firm’s new business goals will be achieved through some combination of strategies and tactics, many of which will likely come with a price tag.

But wait, there’s more. (You gotta love marketing, right?)

Above and beyond the cost of a tactic, your firm needs a pretty solid base of marketing infrastructure that comes with its own price tag. Infrastructure can range from costs associated with designing, developing and maintaining a website to marketing technology and software costs, like that for HubSpot.

[Drum Roll] ….and, the Items for This Year’s Marketing Budget are:

My list of marketing items, from A to W, is presented below (download here). We hope that you’ll bring it into your budget discussions as a means of ensuring that you’ve explored and documented all of the items that may be necessary for your marketing infrastructure or for bringing a marketing strategy to life.

We do have one small request, if you please. If you see anything missing from this list, please use the comment section at the end of this post to share your experience with our other readers.

Here’s the list:

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Putting Together a Marketing Budget Isn’t Easy

Let’s face it, there’s not a lot of joy when it comes to putting a marketing budget together. The gaps between expectations and realities, the uncertainties of ROI, the internal politics and infighting, the need to accommodate and compromise, the never ending directives of making do with less … you’ve been there, done that, right?

But when all is said and done and the budget is finalized and approved, you don’t want to have to go back to the well because you haven’t adequately accounted for all of the costs associated with bringing a marketing strategy to life or for putting a necessary piece of marketing infrastructure in place.