Do you plan your marketing tasks for the year? Or are you more of a fly by the seat of your pants marketer?

What about a budget for those marketing tasks?

If you’re a small business, you may not calculate the cost for each marketing task. Especially the tasks you do yourself.

Let’s figure out what kind of budget we have for marketing.

• Or content management
• Or business communication
• Or whatever else you want to call your plan

Introducing a SIMPLE (what else?) marketing task budget calculator to help in your planning

Sample Marketing Task Budget Calculator

What I’ve found is many small businesses or sole proprietors spend little time thinking about what they spend on marketing.

This template is the prompt you may need for planning. Below is an image of the template.

The spreadsheet has two categories: Internal Marketing and Outsourced Marketing.

Internal Marketing

Let’s take a closer look at the Internal Marketing category.

This section captures the tasks performed in-house or if you are a sole proprietor, the tasks you do yourself.

 #1 – Hourly Fee

One of the factors we forget about in tasks we do ourselves is the time it takes to do them.

• Enter in your hourly fee
• You can average team member rates
• Or use separate spreadsheets per team member

You can make this as simple or complex as you’d like. You’re the boss.

The spreadsheet calculates total costs based on the tasks and hourly fee.

#2 – Internal Marketing Factors

Think about what type of marketing you plan.

• List each under Task – e.g., PowerPoint presentations, landing page
• The Platform column is where you’ll market it – e.g. Twitter, your business site
• Estimate the hours/minutes per task
• The #Tasks is the total for the year – e.g., 6 PowerPoint presentations, Marketing every day (241 days total)

By the way, if you want to know how many business days are in a year, this site has a handy calculator.

I used 2014 in the example, excluded weekends and public holidays, which left 251 days. I then deducted 10 days for vacation.

Outsourced Marketing

The second section is for marketers who outsource specific marketing tasks.

This section considers the following.

• Task – e.g., white paper, ghostwritten articles
• Vendor name
• Project fee
• Number of Projects – total for the year
• Total Cost of Projects – annually by task

The bottom of the spreadsheet totals internal and outsourced marketing.

If you do not outsource, you can skip this section. Or if you are considering outsourcing, this section helps you calculate costs versus your budget.

For example, you may calculate that performing a task internally is less expensive. However, have you considered the following?

• Does the final product hit the professional tone you want?
• Does the task pull staff (or you) from critical functions?

By reviewing your full marketing costs, you can adjust your plan to what makes sense for your business.

Download a pdf version of this template or an Excel document to enable adjustments to your plan.

This template and the vision template are samples from work-in-progress ebook, Developing Your Business Marketing Plan: A 10-Part Plan for Success. 

The next post shares a template for determining the best communication vehicle for specific projects.

Please share your thoughts/feedback in Comments.

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Helping you Keep it simple, clear & uniquely yours – contact me for help with your business writing needs.

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Have a shoestring budget? Download A Simple Marketing Budget Guide for Simple Budgets.