Make Planning Your 2024 Marketing Budget Easier With These 3 Tips

The end of the year is often a busy time for cannabis business owners preparing for the holiday rush while simultaneously looking ahead to the next year and planning their annual budget.

Planning your business’s budget is critical because it gives you an understanding of what you need to spend throughout the year to run your business. For your marketing budget in particular, it’s also a crucial step in building your marketing strategy. The best marketing budgets help you make strategic decisions about your marketing throughout the year so that you maximize the return on your investment.

Here are 3 tips that will help you create your 2024 marketing budget.

REVIEW YOUR 2023 MARKETING

It’s much easier to know where you want to go if you have a good understanding of where you’ve been.

Take time to look over all of the marketing that you did in 2024, your data and analytics from each marketing tactic, and how much you spent. Compare it to the marketing goals that you set for 2023 and your sales throughout the year.

While you’re reviewing it, ask yourself (and your marketing team) these questions:
What tactics were most successful in generating revenue?
What tactics were least successful or hard to connect to revenue?
Did certain products sell better or worse than you expected? How were those products marketed?
Who were your customers in 2023? Were they different than you expected in any way? What was their consumer journey like?
What outside factors influenced your business this year? Think of industry trends, increased or decreased competition, etc.
How does your marketing data align with your marketing goals?

Taking a critical look at your marketing data will help you determine what marketing tactics worked and what you may want to change in 2024.

CHOOSE YOUR GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Once you have an idea of how your marketing performed in 2023, start to think about your goals and objectives for 2024.

Your business likely has one overarching goal, which may be as broad as increasing sales by a certain percentage. That’s not likely to change year to year. But you should also have a few other goals that are more focused, such as growing flower sales or increasing online orders.

Having the data from your 2023 marketing campaigns helps.

You should also think about any changes that may be happening in 2024. Perhaps a new dispensary will be opening in your town, increasing your competition. There may be a new product line may become available, or one of your current product lines may be going away. Maybe your own cannabis growing operation is changing because you’re growing new strains.

With that information, you can choose realistic yet challenging goals and objectives for 2024.

SET YOUR MARKETING BUCKETS

Now that you have your goals and objectives, you can decide what your overall marketing buckets will be and prioritize them according to your goals. Marketing every product you offer or need your business fulfills is too broad of a goal — it will result in overspending. Instead, choose up to 3 or 4 buckets that you will focus on, and then prioritize them based on your goals.

Examples of buckets you could choose include:

Returning customers/loyalty program
Hiring and recruitment
General branding
Cartridges
Vendor Days
Online orders

Planning your marketing budget is a big task! Check out four more tips that can help you, including how to plan for the unexpected, in the full blog 7 Tips For Planning Your 2024 Marketing Budget from Federated Digital Solutions.

Are you looking for a new marketing partner to help you reach your business goals next year? Cannabis Digital Solutions is here to help! Reach out to us to learn more about how we help cannabis businesses grow revenue.

Krystal Vivian

Krystal Vivian is the Director of Social Media and Content Marketing at Cannabis Digital Solutions. She has more than 10 years of experience using written content, podcasts, and social media to help businesses build trust and deep relationships with their audiences. A former journalist turned digital marketer, Krystal is passionate about powerful storytelling and great user experiences. She specializes in creating compelling content that educates, entertains, and engages people.