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Nearly every industry uses pallets to handle, transport, assemble, and store products. Made usually of wood, pallets serve as a base to help keep products safe and protected. This is why the pallet industry in the U.S. has grown by half in the last 10 years alone.
Getting in on this booming industry requires money, and ensuring you properly manage that money requires a budget. One of the pivotal items in your pallet manufacturing business budget is marketing. Without it, customers won’t even know you exist or why to patronize your business over others in the field.
Below we’ve provided a clear and comprehensive guide to help you create a pallet business marketing budget, and it all starts with a solid marketing strategy or plan.
A key part of your overall pallet manufacturing business plan should be a thorough and detailed marketing plan or marketing strategy; you can then use this plan as the basis for developing a realistic marketing budget. A practical and effective marketing strategy for your pallet manufacturing business should serve as a roadmap to your objectives and contain certain key components.
Armed with this information, you can develop a marketing budget to help you achieve your goals.
A marketing budget represents all your business's funds to promote your products and services.
Marketing budgets can–and should–include the gamut of elements contained in your marketing plan, including:
A realistic and practical marketing budget is fundamental to building and expanding your pallet manufacturing business while avoiding wasting precious funds. It allows you to ensure you’re not spending too little on marketing to generate sales or too much and wasting precious dollars on efforts that don’t produce results. With a solid and well-thought-out marketing budget, you’ll know precisely how much to spend and in what areas to get maximum returns on your investment.
You can develop a thorough and effective marketing budget in five simple steps.
First, you must identify precisely what you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts: building brand awareness, getting leads to join your mailing list, or promoting a new product line. Once you decide on the broad objective, start honing in on the details. Turn these general goals into specific, realistic, timely, measurable, and attainable so you’ll know where to put your attention and the funds to achieve them.
What pathway will new customers take from complete unawareness about you or your business to purchasing pallets from you? This pathway is known as a sales funnel and consists of three stages:
How can you best serve your target market at each marketing funnel stage?
What are the demographics of your target market? Define every relevant factor you can think of to help market more effectively to them: location, industry, size/reach, social media presence, etc.
Ways to collect this vital data include:
Explore, as well, the market trends that influence or expand your audience demographics in the near future.
You must examine your business’s overall money situation to create a pallet business marketing budget. Determine your current income and expenses. Ask yourself how much you are okay with spending on the business every year, quarter, or month.
You can map out your pallet business’s marketing budget in one of two ways:
As your pallet manufacturing business grows, you must track what’s effective and what’s not. A basic spreadsheet is all you really need to accomplish this. Create a column representing every month, and itemize each individual element of your marketing budget in the rows; then, create another row where you track the objectives you laid out in the first of these five steps. As each month closes out, note your spending on each item and analyze how well or not it helped you move toward those objectives. As you notice changes to your budget that need making, make them.
A clear marketing budget will allow you to perform a break-even analysis showing how much revenue you need to cover your budget. Such an analysis is integral to a comprehensive business plan that helps you acquire funding for your pallet manufacturing business and gives you clear guidelines for moving forward successfully with your marketing budget.
Here are some main ways to spend your marketing budget on digital marketing. You can use each of these as line items on your budget spreadsheet. There are many offline marketing channels, including print and radio ads and outreach and events.
Branding may include, among others:
Solid branding gives a more professional look to your pallet business.
Your pallet business website is one of your most central and fundamental marketing assets, as your website is where your business is located on the internet.
Email marketing includes new subscriber email series, email newsletters, and notifications of promotions and events. The keys to successful email marketing are to build a big email list of interested, targeted leads and use all the email tools at your disposal to maintain steady communication with them.
Writing educational content like blogs and articles about pallets and their use and care is a way to position yourself as a trusted and reliable expert in the industry. You also create more informed buyers this way, which can also help you increase sales. You can even trade posts with other related websites to partner in marketing to the same or similar audiences and, in that way, expand your own pool of potential buyers.
Similarly to written content marketing, your business can create videos for similar purposes. Audiences respond well to messages with a visual element, especially video.
Whatever type of online content you create, search engine optimization (SEO) is how you spread the word about that content to potential viewers. With SEO tools like keyword research, competitive analysis, and tracking rankings, you can optimize your content and your site and marketing strategy to reach as many interested, targeted eyes as possible via search engines like Google.
Social media is an online hub of activity where you can always find new potential customers to target and further foster your relationships with existing customers. Social media marketing involves promoting your pallet manufacturing business on social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Successful social media marketing requires investments in steady social media content production (such as videos, photos, writing, and graphics) and active engagement and interaction with your followers, visitors, and partners.
Paid advertisements (PPC advertising,) webinars, and affiliate marketing are other ways to attract customer attention and interest online.
There is a large market for pallets used across all industries. And, because pallets eventually wear out and require replacement, providing them offers much repeat business.
While pallet manufacturing is a lucrative business, you must remain competitive in the industry to thrive, which requires marketing. Marketing is how your customers become aware of your existence and what you have to offer them. And now you know how to create a pallet business marketing budget to help you achieve those goals.
For pallet manufacturers looking to increase their sales, schedule a 15-minute discovery call with the Pallet Company Marketing pros today!
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