Online marketing budget is on the rise.

As the year comes to an end, thoughts about your marketing budget can't be far off, if not downright in-your-face.

A major component of marketing budgets is the online portion (70% for small business, 43% for medium sized B2B business, in 2011) consisting of website related tactics, paid advertising, email, and social media. (Click image to see budget allocations.)

Mobile is here now!

Broader audience usage of computers, smartphones and tablets have increased the opportunities and potential for a business to be found online. This means that you not only need a website but at some point you will need to consider having a mobile website optimized for smartphone usage, and start budgeting now.

Budget to generate leads not just traffic.

Most importantly, you need these websites to function as a lead generation machine. Traffic is not the goal. Leads and customers are. A lead generation machine means there is a process in place for converting traffic to leads and then, leads to customers. This should be an early internet marketing expenditure. If this process is not in place, the traffic comes and the traffic leaves, and you have no way of communicating with them again. Read more about this process of getting leads and start allocating your budget to this very important internet strategy.

The process of converting leads to customers.

Part of this process of attaining leads and converting them to customers requires content creation for your website through blog articles and emails that will communicate and take a lead through their process of becoming a customer. Allocating budget and resources for this are imperative.

Once you have content in place, reaching out to prospects, known and unknown, through social media, will expand your audience. Social media is not going away. It will take some time and resources, which should be budgeted for.

As you can see, your involvement as a business owner with online marketing activities is, and will continue to grow in importance.  Budget for it, allocate slices of it for different online activities, and increase you bottom line.

Online marketing budget priorities:

• Optimize for mobile devices
• Create new content
• Build social media audience