Your Digital Marketing Agency in Denver.

Marketing people tend to make things more complicated than necessary. They talk all about the latest trends and recently published articles. They’ll tell you how complicated and how fragmented the online world has become. At TimeHoodie, we’ve been doing this for over 20 years and the landscape has always been like this. There’s only one thing that matters. You. You are the constant.

The most important step is getting to know you. Your business. What separates you, what makes you unique. Understanding your place within your industry and your standing amongst your competition. Fortunately, for the both of us, we have deep experience in almost every industry out there.

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What is a typical budget for Digital Marketing?

This question is one of the hardest ones to answer and at the same time accurately manage your expectations; because the answer varies widely. Your digital marketing budget will 100% of the time be directly correlated with your specific business, industry, and sales goals. If you want to get a sense of a spending range, this still varies wildly, but it’s almost easier to work backwards; we’ll start by describing budget sizes and what they typically get you.

  • Most likely, either a trial or exploratory campaign to test the effectiveness of digital marketing for a small to mid-sized company – or – the budget for a smaller company that does not have a lot of comfort with digital marketing and/or has not been able to generate a strong ROI at larger spends.
  • You might not have done digital marketing prior or tried previously and want to give it another go, or have some success and gravitate around a small, but good-performing pool of tacts with a limited budget.
  • Alternatively, a budget this size may be related to a local business or small company that does not require a large budget to get a high return on their investment and this is where the data implies that the effectiveness of their budget is maxing out.

  • This could still be an exploratory or entry-level budget depending on the size of the company
  • Spends of this size are sometimes associated with SMBs that may have more than one location and a little larger staff size, but still have a limited marketing department; perhaps only 1 or 2 marketing-related FTEs, and they may be wearing multiple hats.
  • This is sort of the graduate level from test campaigns and/or a breakthrough from a marketing state of arrested development. The size of your company, the geographic area you are targeting, the products or services your offer, etc. warrants coverage large enough to “feed the growing beast” of your size.
  • Alternately, you may have a small or local business and not be a very large “beast,” but the type of product or service you offer warrants a larger budget because of your particular situation. For example, the average CPC for the Attorney category is $47.07 (WordStream). The keyword phrase “methothelioma lawyer” may seem outrageous priced, but you may rethink that when you realize there is over “$30 billion set aside for victims…”

  • Companies at this level are usually larger corporations with a larger employee base, may have multiple locations; they are minimally in the $5M annual revenue range, but they are more likely to be closer to $10-25M+ in annual revenue.
  • Prior to this level, most of the paid media spend likely gravitated around search + social with spot buys elsewhere (i.e. limited display advertising, re-marketing, etc.), but in this tier there is good chance that most display/interactive campaigns are being maxed out and other channels are being leveraged as well like affiliate marketing, in-game advertising, etc.

At this point things can quickly jump to $100,000/mo to $1,000,000/mo (it’s a wild ride). Marketing is baked into the fabric of what your company does to thrive and maintain market share. You’re constantly monitoring your competitors in terms of spends, placements, product and service price points, innovations, trends, etc. In larger companies, your “test” campaign budgets are five figures and the entire budgets of all previous tiers combined would be equivalent to a rounding error on your annual budget.

  • Online Retail
  • Travel + Leisure
  • Education (especially prior to the for-profit sector taking a hit)
  • Jobs/Recruitment
  • Computers/Technology
  • Automotive
  • Internet and Telecom

Bottom line — our team members have managed marketing spends for clients that are as small as $500 per month and up to $1,500,000 per month. Yes, you read that correctly, that’s quite a range, right?

What sort of budget do I need for Digital Marketing?

Wait, didn’t we just answer this one? No. We did not. While the majority of CMO’s and Marketing Directors we speak with understand the statistics, they get the logic, and in many instances their budgets largely align with what we are about to tell you… they still want to know when the $$$ shake out, in terms of marketing budget and spend, are they considered a large, medium, or small player. Which is the purpose of the bullet-list above. The answer to, “how much marketing budget do you need – regardless of industry, size of your company, if you sell goods or services, etc. – is as follows:

Your marketing budget should be 10% of your gross annual revenue. Of that, 15% should be allocated as a direct expense to media costs, 75% to internal marketing staff and/or outside marketing agency support, and 10% to subscriptions, training, office supplies and other marketing overhead.

The above marketing budget percentages will only vary 2-3 points based on industry with very few exceptions (example, consumer goods and services may have budgets as high as 20% of gross annual revenue, manufacturing less than 5%…). If you are looking to grow your company, then you should be budgeting higher than 10%. The amount higher depends on intended rate of growth and industry competitiveness, but a steady, focused growth would likely require approximately 20% of gross annual revenue.

Would You Like Help Calculating Your Annual Marketing Budget?

Paid Search, Organic Search, and Display Campaigns

Many of our clients ask if they can drive all the traffic they need by only focusing on organic, owned, and earned means. The reality is you can start with that, but when those sources become maxed out, your digital marketing strategy will inevitably include some form of digital paid media. At that point, you need a partner with deep experience with CPA, CPC, CPM, affiliate marketing, shopping feed, and other forms of media buys will keep your campaigns running efficiently and effectively while generating the highest ROI.

Social Media Management

Never-ending friending… Social is one of the most powerful channels we work with currently. The level of targeting, re-marketing, and engagement has skyrocketed over the years. We will help you promote specific events, drive sales, grow your following, and illicit action on behalf of the audience. We will also aggregate relevant content and post at a predefined frequency to increase online followers.

Email Marketing

According to a McKinsey report, email marketing generates $38 for every $1 spent. Constantly optimizing your email tactics can even further increase your ROI. For example, are you optimized for mobile? TechCrunch has reported that 75% of Gmail’s 900M users typically read their email on mobile devices. Experian shows that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates, yet only 39% of online retailers send personalized product recommendations according to Certona. We will help you drive greater ROI via high-return, low-cost email marketing strategies and tactics that align with current trends and emerging opportunities.

Re-targeting and Re-marketing

At TimeHoodie, we believe that re-marketing (aka retargeting) is probably the most underutilized, highly-effective marketing tactic. According to Digital Information World, users who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert, retargeted ads increase branded search exposure by over 1,046%, and 49% of major brands setting aside specific budgets just for retargeting. We will put our experience to work for you to take advantage of this “incredibly powerful” and “ridiculously cheap” channel (WordStream).

Content marketing

According to this IDC report, CMOs at the largest companies believe content marketing is the second most important initiative, behind ROI. Yet, 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter. At TimeHoodie, we often see watered-down content that is churned out with the goal of meeting a regular deadline, in lieu of attempting to provide genuine value to a prospective customer or  making a connection with your audience. The key to great content is quality over quantity.

Analytics + Reporting

Is there anything better than a hot cup of coffee, sliceable data, and a clear afternoon for analysis at the speed of thought? We believe in one source of truth for data. We prefer a hub-and-spoke model of architecture. We believe in regular meetings to review data, insights, and findings. We are fanatical about ensuring data that goes into our systems is tracked properly from the front end, logged, and reported on consistently. We believe in letting the numbers work themselves out when making decisions and that data itself is not strategy, rather it is a measure of effectiveness and a wellspring used to identify opportunities.

Unless you need help marketing dressage or spelunking services, chances are we already know your space. We’re space invaders. We’re disruptors. We unseat regimes and we are passionately cunning on your behalf.

Video production + marketing

Today’s easy-access to high-speed internet connections has audience’s demanding more and more video content. In fact, according to a recent HubSpot study, 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers. Why? Because 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product then read information about it (Animoto). Marketers using video are growing revenue 49% faster than those who aren’t using video (Aberdeen). The great news is that TimeHoodie, makes Video production for social and web use is extremely affordable.

Traditional + Print Collateral and More

We do such a great job (if we do say so ourselves) at design that we are frequently asked to offline, traditional work as well. Everything from branding, logo design, collateral material like business cards and letterhead, and more. Whether it’s print advertising or online, we easily jump from RGB to CMYK. Go from files 72 dpi that are less than 100k to 4-color full page bleeds at 300 dpi and over 80 megs. We sweat whether or not the custom gold foil and spot gloss accents register correctly.

Off-beat projects excite us. We’ve designed custom poker chips, golf cart decals, retractable banners for event promotion, car wraps, and more.

TimeHoodie | Your simple solution to everything.