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Planning and setting a marketing budget for your own business is not the easiest task. When this company also works with a large number of partners who all manage and usually pay for their own local marketing, this task becomes even more complex. Nevertheless, as a brand and marketing hub, you should not neglect this important planning step and support your partners as best you can in marketing and budget planning. In this article you will find important tips and steps on how to set the general budget and communicate it ideally to the local partners. 

Why do you need a clear marketing budget? 

A clearly defined marketing budget not only provides a guideline for your partners, but is also fundamentally a very helpful tool for carrying out successful marketing. The marketing budget provides guidance to stay on track and set the right priorities in local marketing. It helps you to realise the marketing goals and also to be successful in the long run. Therefore, a properly set marketing budget and the ideal handling of it are always also an investment in the growth of the business. 

Setting marketing budgets 

To set the right budget, it is important to define clear goals at the beginning and derive the planned marketing measures from them. Depending on the effort and costs of the individual measures, the production costs, distribution costs and the working time of the employees, the required budget can be derived. Basically, however, the general marketing budget should not only be used for acquiring leads, but also for building a wider reach, better trust and strong customer loyalty in order to be successful in the long term. 
If no individual figures are known, a general guideline can also be used, depending on the industry. For companies and suppliers in the automotive industry, the marketing budget averages around 3%, in the service sector 8-10%, while for companies like Red Bull even up to 30% of the sales volume is spent on marketing. However, if no industry values are known, the golden mean of about 10-15% of turnover is recommended.

Communicating the marketing budget 

In addition to planning and setting the budget, communication is a particularly important part of working with local partners. Here, you must not only communicate the given budget to your partners, but ideally also explain it and make it understandable. It is best to share not only the general marketing budget, but also the individual goals and how the partners can contribute to achieving them with their local marketing. Only if the budget is suitably adapted to the partner's individual situation will they understand it and use and implement it for their own planning.