It’s that time of year again – and if it’s not exactly that time of year for you right now, it will eventually be (dun, dun, duuuuun): budget time.

It’s the time of year when you’ll have to decide how to allocate your marketing budget, and figure out your rationale when you go to upper management on bended knee and ask for more.

The good news is, if you deal primarily with online marketing, you have a much easier way to justify your spending, because the results are so immediately quantifiable. (Woe betide your colleagues who must demonstrate the ROI for “billboard advertising” or “personalized mugs.”)

Yet, calculating whether or not your online media spend will be sufficient to achieve your revenue targets is not that simple. Unless you accurately include the true costs of your online marketing, you could be under spending – or even over spending. Or worse yet, missing out on huge amounts of potential revenue.

Take note that these calculations are a bit different for our clients. They don’t have to calculate coding, developing, analytics, hosting, or testing, because it’s all included in their LiveBall platform. They save immense amounts of time and money, and are able to focus on strategy, design, and creative.

Media Cost

The obvious line item, this is what you’re spending to drive traffic via cost-per-click (search engine marketing), display advertising, email marketing, or some combination of everything. This is the hard cost of the media. (Generally, a hard cost is something you have to pay for, while a soft cost occurs within your own organization –something another department does).

Media Creative & Production

This is what it costs you to create and produce the ads that drive your traffic. If you produce your creative in-house, you need to look at the loaded costs of the resources you use internally. What percentage of that person’s time are being spent on creative and production? Even if it’s your own time. After all, that’s time you can’t spend doing something else.

Landing Page Writing & Design

Once again, these are your hard external or soft internal creative costs for creating your landing pages. (While it’s difficult to quantify, think for a minute about how much time goes by between when you want the landing pages created, and when they can be deployed. I once spoke to a lady who said it takes 6 weeks for her company to launch a new landing page, and therefore six weeks before it can be changed if it’s not performing. Think about how many impressions (and how much money) she’s effectively wasting – not to mention all the missed revenue— while the underperforming landing page is still up! But I digress…)

Landing Page Development/Coding

Whether you outsource or code your landing pages internally, there is a cost associated with development and coding.

Landing Page Deployment/Hosting

This expense covers where your landing pages are hosted. All web pages are deployed to servers and use bandwidth, and there’s a cost associated with it.

Landing Page Testing

If you’re not testing your landing pages, you sure as heck should be! Otherwise, you need to consider the expenses associated with testing, whether you’re using a testing solution provided by an external resource, or one delivered by another department within your organization.

Landing Page Analytics/Reporting

If you’re outsourcing or using a dedicated package or service to provide your analytics, there will be a hard cost, but there are also a lot of soft costs to capture here. Often your soft costs associated with analytics are far higher than the hard costs, because of all the time you spend crunching the numbers.

Getting the picture? It’s complicated. Fortunately, we can make sense of it all for you. We’ve developed powerful ROI calculators that let you clearly see the total cost of your online marketing, allow you to compare optimized scenarios and see the opportunity costs. In just minutes, you can find options that will lower costs, raise revenue and make you a rock star. We have a calculator just for your business model (lead gen or e-commerce transaction) and we’d love to take you through it. Before you spend any more time putting together your 2009 budget, spend a few minutes calculating now.