Before developing this marketing budget planner, I had teams get themselves into trouble with budget management. No one is ever perfect - not even me - but something had to be done to help teams and brands better manage budgets and pacing of their campaigns.
To reduce the chance of your budget going out of control, and to help set yourself up for the new financial year, we at Shaun Polidano Consulting are giving away our marketing budget planner template to you all.
Now, let's get into how to use the marketing budget planner to set yourself up for success.
Step One: Add all your media budgets to the marketing planner.
(Reference B3 - P3)
Who likes to know where all their media is being spent in one place? We definitely do! This section of the planner is designed to track your budget for the entire calendar year. Each row provided within the planner has room to add in the campaign name and platform type you are using.
Easily input your budgets and watch the planner calculate your budget per campaign and month. Brilliant!
Step two: Actual campaign spend vs planned
(Reference B19 - P19)
We've had the experience where budgets can change halfway through the month. For example, a brand wanted to inject an additional budget into their campaign to meet the increased demand for their products.
So to compare against the original budget, we have added a table to reflect the actual budget spent for the month. To quickly understand the budget difference, there is a simple calculation in row 15.
The budget difference is then instantly applied to the new month's budget, easily making sure you meet the total campaign budget applied in the planner. So, so smart!
Step three: Pacing and tracking over the month
(Reference R3 - W3)
Platforms, such as Facebook and Google, have become great at using AI to manage your daily budget and make sure it hits a monthly target. But it's not always foolproof; ensuring your marketing team is on top of budgets and how the funds are being spent means you can quickly make decisions on what is working and what isn't.
On average, a Shaun Polidano consultant reviews budget pacing every two days for our clients. While we have a great system in place, we know not every brand or agency can do those frequent checks. So at a minimum, we recommend doing a weekly update of this budget planner to ensure you meet your budget targets.
Step four: Take a breather and trust that you will never have another budget tracking issue.
From experience, implementing this simple process and marketing budget planner into teams has meant that no client spends have gone missing, have either under or overspent and have paced correctly over the campaign period.
If you like this template, share the link with others. We created it to help clients and agency partners alike. Now, good luck and pace on!