Advertising is an essential and unavoidable part of running a football academy or any successful organisation. While using your own free communication channels (your website, your social media pages, word-of-mouth, email) should definitely be part of your strategy, online paid advertising can provide several benefits and represent an effective addition to promote your activities and events.
But how much should you invest when running online adverts?
A generally accepted rule is for small and medium sized businesses is that you should invest between 2% and 5% of your revenue on advertising.
For example, if you are planning a yearly advertising budget for your football season to cover advertising to cover general awareness about your football academy and your events, you could budget 2-5% of your club’s yearly revenue. Or, if you want to advertise a specific event that you are organising, this could be 2-5% of your event’s total revenue.
This is a general rule that can differ between organisations and industries. And based on your results of the previous season, you can decide to allocate more or less of your advertising budget.
Going Further with Online Advertising Budgets
Brand Awareness vs Customer Acquisition Campaigns
Advertising campaigns can have different goals. Brand awareness campaigns are adverts designed to familiarise your audience with your brand or with a specific message.
Customer acquisition campaigns (also called conversion campaigns) are adverts designed to get your audience to take a specific action (like buying a product or registering to an event).
Your digital advertising goals could be:
- Getting new customers in your region that aren’t yet part of your club to read your Facebook post (brand awareness)
- Ensuring that your members see the latest news of your club (brand awareness)
- Selling out an event that you are organising, like a tournament or football camp (customer acquisition)
Depending on your goals, you use information from previous advertising campaigns you have run or from your industry to calculate your advertising budget for a campaign with more accuracy.
You can read our other articles to learn how to calculate your budget for brand awareness campaigns or how to calculate your budget for customer acquisition campaigns using metrics you can find in advertising platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok.
Thanks for reading!
We hope this article gave you a better idea of how to start setting a digital advertising budget and how you can use it to become an even better football academy. At Oxasport, we help football coaches and academies improve their skills through experiences and educational resources. Check out our Football Education Programs for football coaches and players to discover experiences develop your skills at the best Clubs in the world.
