Plan your marketing budget and vendors

Kite builds a list of every recurring marketing cost, with what each one costs, what it's for, and when it renews. This list is the base of the whole plan, because you can't decide what to keep until you can see it all in one place.

It gathers the list from several places at once. Kite can detect the marketing and analytics products your website uses, so it finds the tools that leave a trace on your site, such as an analytics script, a chat widget, a form builder, or a scheduling link. With QuickBooks connected, it reads the bills and vendors your bookkeeper already records. With your Google Ads, Meta Ads, or LinkedIn Ads accounts connected, it reads what each one spent. For everything else, you can share a PDF of last quarter's card statement, a spreadsheet you already keep, or a quick list in the conversation.

Kite then sorts each cost into a few plain groups: software, people and agencies, advertising, events, and physical items such as swag and printed materials. For each one, it notes who uses it and which part of your marketing it supports. A $400-a-month social scheduling tool that one person logs into once a week looks different from one the whole team uses daily.

You need the tools and vendors that do work your current goal depends on, and that nothing else you pay for already covers. Kite checks each line on your list against those two tests and tells you which ones fail.

The first test catches tools that outlived their purpose. A webinar platform bought for a series that ended last spring, or a review-site listing nobody has updated in a year, still charges every month. Kite compares each tool with your current goals and asks whether it would make the list if you were starting today.

The second test catches overlap. Small teams often pay for two tools that do the same job, such as two email platforms after a migration that never finished, or a design tool and a stock-photo subscription when the design tool already includes photos. Kite also checks your list against what comes with Kite. It ships with more than 20 built-in data sources, including Apollo for contact data and DataForSEO for keyword data, along with website hosting, website analytics, and image and video generation. If you pay for a separate tool only to look up a few email addresses or check a handful of keywords each month, Kite tells you so, and you can decide whether that subscription still earns its price.

Kite gives you a recommendation for each line: keep it, cancel it at the next renewal, or replace it with something that fits better. Each recommendation comes with the reason. You make the call, and Kite records what you decided in your team's knowledge base.

Split it in two. First set aside the fixed costs you've decided to keep. Then divide the flexible money that's left across the channels and campaigns your goal depends on, with most of it on what already works and a smaller share for tests.

Here's what that looks like for a software company with $1.5 million in yearly revenue that budgets 8 percent for marketing. That's $120,000 a year, or $10,000 a month:

• Fixed commitments. After Kite's review, the team keeps $1,400 a month in software and a $2,500-a-month freelance writer. That's $3,900 a month.
• Events. Two conferences at about $12,000 each, including the booth, travel, and swag, come to $24,000 a year, or $2,000 a month.
• Flexible money. The remaining $4,100 a month goes to ads, content promotion, and experiments.

For the flexible money, Kite often suggests a rule many marketers use, called 70-20-10. About 70 percent goes to channels with proven results, 20 percent to promising channels that need more proof, and 10 percent to new experiments. In this example, that's $2,870 a month on the channel that brings in most customers, $820 on a second channel, and $410 on a test. Kite adjusts the split to your situation. A new company with no proven channel yet might put most of its flexible money into two or three small tests instead.

Kite ties each line of the plan to the goal it serves, so the plan explains itself. When you have a growth goal in Kite, such as doubling demo requests by the end of the second quarter, the budget shows which spending supports it. When a channel has no clear connection to your goal, Kite says so.

Related use cases

• Choose which ad platforms to spend on: Decide which ad platform deserves the advertising share of your budget, and how much a customer would cost on each one.
• Choose which marketing channels to invest in: Compare search, ads, email, events, and other channels before you decide where the flexible money goes.
• Turn a growth goal into a marketing plan Coming soon Set the goal your budget is built around, along with the first pieces of work toward it.

Kite plans swag and event materials backward from your event dates, so every order goes in early enough and the year's physical spending is in the budget from the start. Most teams handle swag one event at a time, which is how a rush order ends up costing twice what it should.

Kite starts by building the year's event calendar with you. It can research the conferences your customers and competitors attend, what sponsorship packages cost, and which ones are worth a booth. For each event, it lists what you'll need: shirts or stickers for a booth, a banner, a one-page handout, or a thank-you gift for speakers and top customers. Then it works out when each item needs to be ordered and adds the cost to the plan.

Kite designs the merchandise and materials from your brand's logo, colors, and fonts. With your Printify account connected, it sets up each design as a product and places the order once you approve it. With Printful connected, it places the order once you approve it. Either way, the charges go to that account. Because print-on-demand services print each item when it's ordered, Kite can send one box to a booth and a separate shirt to each speaker without a minimum order. For printed items like banners and handouts, Kite hands the finished artwork files to the printer you already use.

Related use cases

• Create branded merchandise for a launch or event: See how Kite designs, sets up, and orders swag for a single launch or event.
• Plan your event sponsorship strategy Coming soon Decide which conferences are worth a booth, which to attend without one, and which side events to use instead.

When the plan needs outside help, such as a video producer, a printer, or a freelance designer, Kite researches the options, compares them, and writes the brief. That saves the afternoon most teams spend reading pricing pages and writing the same request three times.

Kite researches vendors on the public web and cites its sources. For each option, it gathers what the vendor offers, what it charges when that's published, who it has worked with, and what reviewers say. It compares the options against what you need and the budget line the work belongs to, and recommends one or two to contact.

Then Kite writes the brief. A good brief tells the vendor what you're making, who it's for, the deadline, the budget, and what a finished result looks like, and Kite fills it in from what it knows about your brand and the project. Once you approve the brief, Kite can send it from your team's Kite email address. Vendor replies come back to that address, so Kite can read the quotes, compare them with the budget, and tell you which one fits.

Kite runs a monthly check that compares what each line of the budget has spent with what the plan allowed, and tells you where you're over, under, or about to be charged for a renewal. A plan only helps if someone looks at it after it's written, and this keeps the check from depending on anyone's memory.

You agree with Kite on the day each month and where to send the results. Each run reads your connected ad accounts and QuickBooks, updates the actual spending in your budget sheet, and sends you a short summary. A typical summary might say that LinkedIn spent $600 more than planned because a campaign ran a week longer, that a tool you agreed to cancel renews in 30 days, and that the conference budget has $2,000 left for swag.

Kite also watches how the spending connects to results. When one channel brings in customers for less than the others, Kite recommends moving money toward it at the end of the quarter, and records the reasoning so the next plan builds on what this one taught it.

Related use cases

• Shift your marketing budget toward what's working Coming soon Get a quarterly recommendation on where to put more money and where to pull back, based on real results.