Creating a new paid media budget is a challenging undertaking that could drastically impact the success of your campaigns if not done correctly. We have all had the challenge of staring at a blank Excel document wondering, “How am I even going to get started? Where should I allocate most of my spending? Is this avenue even effective in driving sales?” So many factors come into play when making budgeting decisions. So many, that it is easy to get “analysis paralysis” just at the thought of starting new marketing budgets.
That’s why, here at Well-Oiled Marketing, we follow the 60/30/10 rule. The 60/30/10 rule simplifies budget allocation across the digital marketing funnel (if you are not familiar with the digital marketing funnel, our friends over at rockcontent have a great article that you should check out here).
What is the 60/30/10 Rule?
In short, The 60/30/10 rule is a simple, effective digital marketing budget ratio that outlines how you should be spending your marketing budget across your marketing funnel. It suggests using 60% of the budget for awareness tactics, 30% for remarketing, and 10% of highly engaged, or “hot” audiences.
Of course, there is no one size fits all marketing budget. However, after running thousands of paid media campaigns, we have found a lot of success with this ratio.
Why is the 60/30/10 Rule So Effective?
This 60/30/10 works because it aligns with the digital marketing funnel by ensuring that tactics bring users through the early awareness stages, then too, consideration, and conversions. When it comes to budgeting, you always want to ensure that you are spending enough in the awareness phase to produce enough traffic to populate your remarketing list and spend enough in the remarketing stages to get in front of your audience for a second time with more conversion-focused content.. Even the smallest budget can produce enough visitors to your website to build up your remarketing and highly engaged audience groups while still getting an adequate amount of clicks and conversions in the remarketing phases.
How to Begin Using the 60/30/10 Rule
I recommend starting with a small $10-a-day budget on Facebook. Facebook makes it easy to track campaigns driving the most conversion and the growth of your remarketing and hot audiences list. It’s also one of the more accessible platforms to set up these audiences and gives you the most control over targeting and bidding.
Tips and Tricks
Prime Your Digital Marketing Funnel
Before using this budget allocation, make sure you have enough users in each stage of your marketing funnel. Because many paid media platforms have minimum sizes for remarketing audiences, typically around 1000 users. If your remarketing audiences are too small, your ads will not be able to serve that audience. That’s why you should always prime your marketing funnel before running the 60/30/10 rule. When first starting out, spend your budget on the awareness stage so that you drive new users to your website who begin populating your other audiences.
Evaluate Past Campaign Data
Past campaign data holds a wealth of knowledge about how you should budget your digital marketing spend. Use past campaign data to determine what budget allocation works best for you. Review your conversion sources and cost-per-conversion (CPA) to determine how you allocate your budget across digital marketing. Using the 60/30/10 rule as a starting point is a great way to begin collecting data.
Test, Test, Test
There is never going to be a one-size-fits-all all budgeting solution. That’s why you should constantly be testing and generating insights from what has worked best for your campaigns.
Creating a budget that works for your brand is an undertaking that requires a lot of time, effort, and data, which can leave you feeling lost. Luckily we can use the 60/30/10 rule as a starting point to assist us in allocating budgets more efficiently. Want to learn more about this topic, reach out! We are a team of passionate digital marketers who would be thrilled to help your organization make sense of your budget strategy.
