Due to social distancing and stay-at-home orders, digital ad spend is on the rise. Foxhound LLC, a leading digital marketing agency, recently released its SEO Budget Calculator, a free-to-use tool that helps businesses plan their digital ad campaigns.

Foxhound LLC, a leading digital marketing and PR firm in Tampa Bay, has announced the release of a free-to-use digital advertising tool.

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Its release comes amid a global pandemic, one that has prompted more companies to pour more resources into digital marketing, search advertising, and social media, greatly accelerating the rate of digital transformation in marketing.

“Established companies, even large organizations, need assistance with moving more of their marketing efforts to the digital space,” Sam Knox, co-founder and CEO of Foxhound explained. “By offering free tools like the SEO Budget Calculator and other free resources, we endeavor to make the digital marketing and digital advertising space less daunting to organizations and individuals alike.”

According to Statista, digital advertising spend is set to top $171 billion in the United States alone. Unfortunately, many companies have found that their digital marketing efforts have less-than-ideal results. While advertising spend is decidedly on the rise, return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) remains shockingly low.

There has been a marked increase in content marketing and organic marketing efforts like SEO, partly due to how expensive Google Adwords and other search advertising campaigns can be. According to Foxhound, the SEO Budget Calculator can be the first step to increasing your marketing ROI.

“We were inspired to create an elegant solution to some of the fundamental pain-points of search engine marketing,” Jacqueline Carter, founder of Foxhound said. “To be truly effective, every organization needs to invest in both paid and organic keywords. Forecasting the cost is the first step to integrating organic and paid strategies.”

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The SEO Budget Calculator, available for free on the Foxhound website and coming soon to the App Store and Play Store, provides companies with an estimate of their digital ad spend. Users can input their company’s industry, the keywords they are interested in, and the number of days they plan to run their ad, in addition to how aggressively they plan to advertise.

“Planning is key to success in search engine marketing,” Sam Knox added. “So often, just a little bit of planning can save an organization thousands of dollars in unnecessary ad spend.”

Google Adwords, the most popular digital advertising providers, provides companies of all sizes to compete for space on the first page of search results. Many customers fail to recognize that they must “bid” in order to win out against competitors.

Whether or not a bid wins is based on numerous factors, from quality score to past performance. Advertisers pay per click on keywords. The most expensive keywords go for as much as $50 per click. Without an optimization strategy, advertisers can spend thousands of dollars without netting a single conversion.

Worse still, businesses often neglect to track easily measurable digital marketing data. While there are aggregators of data that can automate this process for some metrics through Keyword Planners and customer relationship management software, it’s of the utmost importance to collate, track, and create meaningful data manually as well.

“We hope to empower small businesses,” Sam Knox said. “At a time when things are at their most uncertain, we need to work together to find strategic pathways to growth.”

Without a clear strategy in mind, companies are vulnerable to exceeding their budget in a short amount of time, leading to a significant decrease in campaign effectiveness, which proves deleterious for long-term marketing goals.

The SEO Budget Calculator is available for free and will remain so indefinitely according to Foxhound. Several improvements and updates are in the works and will be made available at zero cost to the consumer.

“The SEO Budget Calculator will always be free,” Jacqueline Carter said. “We want to transform how companies of all sizes approach digital advertising. No matter your budget, you deserve a chance to succeed.”