Planning a budget is often tough, even when you have last year’s numbers to play with. When you are planning a budget for marketing inpatient rehab, you are going to struggle to come up with potential uptake numbers, and with the cost of middle-to-long-term advertising costs.
Middle to Long Term Advertising Costs
The initial budget for starting out your project is pretty easy. You know how much money you can throw at the project, and you can hazard a guess as to the uptake. However, the further down the path you look, the harder it becomes to guess a good budget.
- Is your initial marketing project going to bring in lots of paying customers? Probably not, but there is always a chance.
- Will you have to switch up your marketing effort in a few months and then create a new budget? Quite possibly.
- Will your current project work slightly, but need adjustments and re-budgets in a few months? Quite possibly.
Your middle-to-long-term success throws up such a question mark that it is almost impossible to budget for. With that being the case, you need to assume that the potential uptake of your initial project is zero.
The Potential Uptake
The easiest number to start with is zero. You have to consider the fact that your marketing project is going to pull in no people at all. In this case, you need to plan for a project that is going to fail. You, therefore, need to find a way to eat the cost of the entire marketing project. You need to scale down your project and make sure that no single element requires you to have paying customers.
Planning for a loss is not that difficult. You simply pick a budget number that you can afford. You will miss the money and it won’t do your business any good when the money is gone, but at least you are not starting by paying more than you can afford.
Going From Zero
Now, let’s assume that you plan for zero. You plan for your project to bring in exactly zero new customers. That is fine, and so long as you can afford it, then that project poses no risk to your company.
However, your marketing budget and your marketing plan should allow for extensions of themselves. It should allow for you to re-budget and scale up your project based on your success.
This is not as difficult as it sounds. If your project brings in new customers, you assign a small portion of their profits right back into your marketing project. With that new slice of cash, you scale up your project a little or you extend it a little. You only scale up or extend if you gain new customers from the project and if they turn into a profit.
If you are looking for strong and useful advice on marketing inpatient rehab, then get in touch with Reputation Rehab. Create a strong and data-driven plan and generate a budget that allows you to scale up and extend your project as you draw in more customers.