What does a marketing campaign cost?
A marketing campaign consists of many building blocks and offers numerous possibilities. Each building block adds value to the campaign, but also incurs costs. We have broken down the costs.
2 min
Florian Werner
The best product or the greatest service is useless for a company if the customer does not know that it exists. Marketing is simply not possible without it. But with technology and traditional media, there are countless different ways to reach the target group. And accordingly, there are countless opportunities to invest company money in marketing. But how much can an effective marketing campaign actually cost and what is marketing invested in? We have set ourselves the task of providing an overview so that your marketing budget can achieve its goals and deliver an appropriate ROI.
What does a marketing campaign cost? A marketing campaign to advertise a certain product can bring your first customers with internet marketing from €100. For large companies, hundreds of thousands of euros can be spent on a campaign. A rule of thumb says: Invest 2.5 % to 7.5 % of turnover in marketing.
Your question will probably not be fully answered, and rightly so. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer as to what a marketing campaign costs. The cost of a marketing campaign depends on a variety of factors. If your company's turnover could increase from €8 million to €9 million a year through targeted marketing, would this be worth a marketing campaign of €100,000 to you?
However, nobody wants to pay too much for a desired goal. So you're right to ask yourself: Can I achieve the increase in sales with a marketing campaign costing €50,000?
In order to better understand the costs of a marketing campaign, we have broken down a marketing campaign into its components and identified the most important cost drivers. You can then decide for yourself what a marketing campaign should cost for your company with your specific goals and what ROI should be achieved.
What is a marketing campaign?
Marketing campaigns are a series of measures that advertise a certain product, service or company through various media such as radio, television, print or online platforms. They are large-scale, time-limited measures that target customers and customer groups in order to communicate specifically. The objectives of marketing campaigns are
Identify potential customers and markets
Winning new customers
Retain existing customers
Avoid customer churn
Customer recovery
Marketing campaigns are often the customer's first point of contact with the company and the first opportunity to enter into a dialog with the company. Different types of campaigns allow for different types of dialog. For example, traditional media often only communicate from the company to the customer by presenting the product to the customer. Modern methods such as marketing campaigns via social networks allow a direct exchange between companies and customers.
No advertising measure has to be carried out alone. The exact coordination of different advertising media over the period of the marketing campaign should be precisely coordinated in order to achieve the desired response.
Types of marketing campaigns
Marketing campaigns differ not only in terms of the target group and methods of communication, but also in the frequency and reason for communication. These factors have a strong impact on the costs of a marketing campaign, as regular or repeated communication is more cost-intensive. In marketing, a distinction is made between the following campaign types:
One-Step Campaign
Each customer receives a specific offer once. These can be special offers or discount vouchers, for example. If the customer does not take advantage of this offer, no further contact is made as part of this marketing campaign.
Multi-Step Campaign
Multi-step campaigns, in contrast to one-step campaigns, contact the customer again after the first contact was unsuccessful. This can take the form of a reminder letter or a phone call, for example.
Event-based campaign
An event-based campaign contacts the customer on the occasion of a specific event. Examples of this are birthdays or public holidays.
1:1 campaign
These campaigns immediately make direct contact with the customer. The customer receives a personalized offer and is contacted directly about it. For example, when buying a new car, a customer can be contacted immediately by an insurance broker to present the insurance and prepare a quote.
Control campaigns
Regular campaigns contact the customer regularly with offers or information about the company. This can take the form of brochures, messages or emails.
Trigger campaigns
Trigger-controlled campaigns are triggered by a customer event. This can be, for example, an advertising catalog after the customer has provided their email address.
Each type of marketing campaign contains different factors that can influence the cost of the marketing campaign. These include factors such as the method of communication and the length of the communication. It is understandable that sending out a printed advertising catalog, for example, is far more expensive than sending out a digital copy.
Building blocks of a marketing campaign
Although the term marketing is often confused with advertising, there is much more to an effective marketing campaign than simply placing advertisements. A marketing campaign must first conduct customer research before it is able to place effective advertising measures. An advertising campaign is therefore divided into three parts by campaign management. These are
Planning the marketing campaign
Implementation of the marketing campaign
Analysis of the marketing campaign
Each of these parts of a marketing campaign requires resources and investment to achieve the desired results. In order to estimate and plan the costs of a marketing campaign, it is important to set a budget and objectives for each of these parts of a marketing campaign.
Planning a marketing campaign
Before advertising can be designed and placed, it is important to plan the campaign. In the planning phase, goals, time periods, milestones, target groups, marketing channels and content are defined. In order to estimate the costs of the planning phase of a marketing campaign, many possible cost factors should be considered:
How much time should be spent on the planning phase?
How many employees take part in the planning phase?
Is all the data available or does intensive market research need to be carried out?
Can all the necessary data be compiled internally or does data have to be acquired?
Can all the resulting advertising measures be designed internally or do agencies have to be brought in to help?
Implementation of a marketing campaign
Once the market research has been carried out and the content for the campaign has been defined, it is time to start implementing the marketing campaign. Here, campaign management is responsible for tracking and documenting the customer response triggered by marketing. Follow-up activities must also be carried out. As with the planning of the marketing campaign, there are numerous factors that influence the cost of running a marketing campaign:
How many staff are required for the implementation.
Is the implementation a largely automated or manual process?
Is the execution managed internally or by external partners?
Are there contingency plans and alternatives that can be adopted after the start of implementation?
Analysis of a marketing campaign
No marketing campaign is complete without analyzing and evaluating the results. During an active marketing campaign, the marketing department receives a large amount of data and information that needs to be collected in order to be able to use it to analyze the campaign. Such a volume of data contains a lot of useful information that is of great value to the company and makes future marketing campaigns more effective.
can be designed. However, before this data can be used, it must first be analyzed. This first incurs additional costs:
Number of employees for the analysis
Additional technical capacities
Specialist staff or external providers
If a company seamlessly integrates all three phases of the marketing campaign, it is possible to constantly and continuously optimize marketing campaigns. Conversely, this means that the costs for marketing campaigns can be reduced and the same goals can be achieved with a smaller budget. It should therefore be avoided to use up the entire budget in the planning and implementation phase. Analysis is an important part of a marketing campaign in order to design future campaigns better and more efficiently.
Costs of an inbound marketing campaign
Inbound marketing is a specific form of marketing that differs drastically from traditional advertising, also known as outbound marketing. Inbound marketing creates valuable content for a company's target group, which builds customer trust and helps them to solve part of their problem. Outbound marketing interrupts a customer's daily routine to inform them. Inbound marketing supports the customer when they are looking for a solution to a specific problem.
Due to the fundamental differences between inbound and outbound marketing, the cost factors that influence the costs of a marketing campaign also change. Especially when switching from outbound to inbound marketing, or adding inbound marketing to a company, costs or investments are incurred by the company:
Initial investment
Inbound marketing is not a one-off marketing campaign, but a cultural change within the company. Inbound culture must be created through workshops and training.
Inbound strategy development
Developing a long-term strategy is particularly important at the start of the inbound marketing process. Costs are incurred through expert coaching, analyses and workshops.
Content design
One of the largest and most significant costs of an inbound marketing campaign is the creation of content. Useful blogs, articles and e-books are written or videos, webinars or online workshops are created.
Active campaigns
The most important goal of inbound marketing is to generate leads. However, the best-designed content is of no value if the target group cannot find it. This means that another major cost of an inbound marketing campaign is the cost of online advertising and SEO.
Tools
A large part of an inbound marketing campaign takes place online. In order to automate processes, there are many software providers that offer premium software to optimize the inbound marketing process.
Anyone opting for inbound marketing should expect a high initial investment. However, inbound marketing opens up numerous new ways of generating leads and therefore opportunities to open up new markets and drastically increase sales.
What can advertising cost?
Advertising, in whatever form, is the component of a marketing campaign that establishes contact with the customer. There are a large number of providers who want to establish this contact for a company - for a fee, of course. But what are the usual costs for the various media?
Costs for flyers and posters
The design by a professional designer and copywriter is between €200 and €600. The printing costs for a one-page DIN A4 flyer are approx. 50 - 75 € per 1,000 copies
Costs of a website
The costs here are heavily based on the size and "capability" of the website. A basic website, designed with an open source program, can be designed for as little as €10,000 - €20,000. If you opt for agencies, there are no upper limits.
Costs for SEO
SEO service providers offer basic optimization for €2000 to €4000. Ideally, ongoing optimization should be carried out. Costs of at least €1000 per month should be budgeted for this.
Costs for social media marketing
In principle free of charge, there are also opportunities to purchase premium features in social media marketing. Small companies can budget between €400 and €1000 for this. If you don't want to manage your social media channels yourself, you can commission service providers to do so. Depending on the amount of work involved, monthly costs start at €1500.
Costs for print ads
The costs for Prinz anzeigen depend heavily on the circulation and the reader profile. For example, a single page in the Süddeutsche Zeitung can cost 60000 €. An ad in Spiegel magazine costs around 50,000 €. Regional newspapers cost between € 7,000 and over € 15,000, depending on circulation and region.
Costs for advertising copy
Costs for advertising copy are usually based on a basic fee plus costs per word. For small ads written by a professional copywriter, you can budget around €150.
Costs for advertising photos
There are cheap solutions online for advertising photos, where stock photos can be purchased for between €1 and €10. If you opt for a photo shoot on location, you should budget at least €2000.
Conclusion:
There is no simple answer to the question of how much a marketing campaign costs. However, it is possible to understand the individual components of a marketing campaign and thus plan a budget. However, it should always be borne in mind that marketing is not a one-off action, but must be carried out on an ongoing basis.
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