GM and welcome back to Marketing Qualified. Here are our topics for today.

• What your marketing budget should look like in 2024. We explain how to decide what percentage of revenue should be spent on marketing.

• Your LinkedIn content strategy for 2024. The type of content you need to post and when to post it.

💰 What your marketing budget should look like in 2024

The new year is almost here, so you’re probably knee-deep in 2024 budget planning.

There has been a lot of chatter in the B2B world this year about the economy, mass layoffs, AI, the rising costs of paid media, the growth of TikTok, the resurgence of LinkedIn, and much more. It’s a lot for marketers to keep up with!

Things are changing faster than ever, making annual planning very difficult.

Expectations remain high, and marketers must find ways to accomplish their KPIs. But unfortunately, many marketers don’t feel like they have the budget to get there. According to Gartner, 71% of CMOs said they lacked the budget to fully execute their strategy in 2023.

75% of CMOs also said they faced increase

d pressure to “do more with less” to deliver profitable growth in 2023. Due to this, 85% of marketers said they have to make major changes to how the marketing function works in order to achieve sustainable results.

It’s a safe bet that similar trends will continue into 2024, so marketers must be ready.

Proper budget planning is the first step towards setting yourself up for success.

But how do you decide how much to budget for marketing in 2024?

Let’s dive into it.

How much of your revenue should be budgeted for marketing?

Looking back at the last five years of data, you’ll see that, on average, marketing budgets comprise roughly 9% of total company revenue.

If you want to take this average and run with it for your 2024 planning, we can’t stop you. But we don’t recommend that.

Instead, it’s best to keep these numbers in mind but dig deeper before you land on your company’s number.

Here are the factors to consider.

Review past performance.

Looking at how your company performed this year is the best place to start.

Pull the results of each campaign and benchmark them against your KPIs. What worked and what didn’t?

Pay special attention to ROI. Which activities lead to the highest return on investment? Which broke even the fastest?

Define objectives.

The next step is to define your marketing and sales objectives for 2024. Are your KPIs similar to last year? If yes, maybe a budget similar to last year will work well for you.

But if they’re significantly different, your budget will likely need to adjust significantly, too.

Consider trends.

What do you expect to happen in 2024 among your competitors and your industry? Consider how these trends should impact your total budget or how you allocate that budget.

For example, Roughly 80% of chief marketing officers are planning to increase their organization’s spending on AI and data for 2024. Up 57% from last year.

A jump that large is something worth paying attention to and factoring it into your strategy, too.

Weight channels.

Not all channels are created equal. Weight their importance towards reaching your goals. And remember that different channels have different strengths and weaknesses.

For example, one channel might be great for customer retention, while another is great for lead generation.

Assess your team.

Does your team have the skills and capacity to meet the expected marketing workload in 2024? If not, then you’ll need to plan to hire additional help. Either internally or externally.

Assess your tech stack.

On average, Martech accounts for over 25% of a company’s marketing budget. This is a big chunk. So, it’s essential to pay close attention to your tools.

What Martech tools are you currently paying for? Do you actually use them, or are they sitting idle?

Will you need to purchase new tools in 2024 to achieve your goals?

These are all things to think about.

Putting it all together.

Only after you’ve considered these other areas is it finally time to get down to brass tacks and land on a budget number.

If you decide on a number that is significantly different than the 9% of the total revenue average, it’s not necessarily wrong. But in that case, you’ll want to have an ironclad plan (with the data to back it up) that you can present to company leadership during your budget meetings.

📰 In the news this week.

💬  Reddit's guide to turning conversations into customers.

📈 SEO trends you can’t ignore in 2024.

🤝  Build a community by holding events.

☠️  Cybertruck flippers beware.

👍  What separates a good marketer from a bad one?

🗓 Your LinkedIn content strategy for 2024.

Do you want to step up your LinkedIn game in 2024? For yourself or your company.

If so, then take a page out of Matt Barker's book. He’s grown his following to over 100K people in less than two years and now ghostwrites for others looking to grow on the platform.

Here’s the posting cadence he recommends:

• 2 x educational posts per week

• 2 x storytelling posts per week

• 1 x promo post per week

Here’s why:

Educational posts.

These help you build trust with your current audience and help them see you as a thought leader. They also attract new followers who want to learn. And they give you an idea of what people need the most help with.

Storytelling posts.

These humanize you to your audience. They help people resonate with you.

They probably won’t drive sales, but they help broaden your audience.

Promo posts.

Share things like testimonials, project results, and recent wins. These build up your authority and show that you get results.

Try out this schedule and see what happens. But remember, consistency is key. You won't see any results if you do this for two weeks and then stop. If you’re going to start, plan to commit to it for at least 4-6 months.

😂 Marketing meme of the week.

How'd we do with this week's newsletter?

• 😍 Loved it

• 😐 Meh, do better

• 👎 You didn't bring the heat 

A READER’S REVIEW

Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to a friend to spread the love.

Want us to write about something specific? Submit a topic or idea.