Editorial
The Gist
- More money, more pressure. Marketers face budget challenges despite increased investments, needing innovative strategies.
- Gain approval. Prioritizing key business metrics can help gain leadership support for larger budgets.
- Drive efficiency. Utilizing martech with solid data foundations can enhance efficiency and drive ROI.
Despite a stubbornly challenging economic climate, UK marketers have reasons to be optimistic. According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s (IPA) quarterly Bellwether report last quarter, businesses stepped up their investment in marketing, with 26% reporting increased marketing budgets.
Yet, marketing teams remain under pressure. The IPA’s report does not reveal by how much businesses increased their marketing budgets, but based on Plinc’s research of 200 senior customer marketers, it’s still not enough.
Our research revealed the most prominent concern for all senior customer marketing professionals remains "the ability to prove the value of customer marketing to protect and increase budget." They report this as more important than their ability to understand and respond to customer behavior.
This situation is not only restricting marketing teams’ capabilities. It’s also harming business growth. According to 68% of those who participated in the same study, the resources and funds available to their departments are preventing them from supporting business growth. It might also impact customer experiences, as more time spent on reporting to justify budget allocations can result in less time spent focusing on the customer.
As such, despite last year’s budget increases, now is not the time for marketers to rest on their laurels and assume budgets are safe. Marketers need to rediscover innovative ways to make the most out of their existing budgets, protecting and increasing investment for next year and beyond. Here are my three suggestions as to how they can do that.
Related Article: For Real? Which Half of My Marketing Budget Is Wasted?
Marketing Budgets Tip No. 1: Prioritize Important Business Metrics
The primary reason that marketing teams suffer from insufficient budgets is a lack of interest from leadership teams. According to our research, four in every 10 senior marketing professionals believe that their senior leadership did not value, held reservations about, or felt indifferent to customer marketing. Gaining their approval is, therefore, crucial for marketing teams to increase their budgets.
The best way for them to do this is to focus on reporting the metrics that matter most from an overall business perspective. To senior leadership teams, this means drawing the link between marketing activity and incremental revenue changes.
As it stands, very few marketing teams are doing this. Our research revealed that only 26% of marketing teams report incremental revenue change in line with campaigns. In some sectors, like ecommerce and travel, this fell to a mere 20% of marketing teams that reported this metric.
As such, marketers must focus reports on the KPIs that matter to their businesses if they’re to demonstrate their team’s worth and stake claims to larger marketing budgets.
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Marketing Budgets Tip No. 2: Driving Martech With Solid Data Foundations
Marketing teams also need to learn how to do more with less: fewer people, less time and less budget. The only real way that they can do that is by improving their efficiency through innovation. This is why martech is becoming one of the most important elements of any marketing strategy today. It is also why solid data foundations have never been more important — they are what enables the technology.
Simply put, to use martech effectively, businesses need to be able to unify, analyze and activate their customer data from a range of online and offline sources — ideally without increasing the pressure on human resources. This can transform a struggling marketing team into a powerhouse with real-time omni-channel agility.
If a marketing team has unified its data and established a solid foundation for its martech, it can also begin to think about exploiting AI. This can help them in a variety of ways, including the optimization and personalization of customer communications. It can also enable them to support other teams by predicting customer behavior and suggesting appropriate "next best actions."
At a time when budgets are insufficient, marketing teams will not want to "rip and replace" their existing technology stacks. Instead, they will prefer to fix their core data foundation to create more progressive long-term martech strategies that will help them focus on areas where they can improve the fastest while delivering the best ROI for their businesses. This will help them to show leadership teams their potential while working with limited resources.
Related Article: A Definitive Checklist to Reduce Marketing Technology Sprawl
Marketing Budgets Tip No. 3: Deliver Value to the Wider Business
As data has become more important to serving an overwhelmingly online customer base, the responsibilities of customer marketers have broadened. Marketing teams are often the primary custodians of customer data. And that makes them the facilitators of their companies’ overall customer data use.
Marketing teams today need to think more about how they can enable other departments to improve their operations using customer data. It’s not only about marketing anymore. If data is made accessible to all stakeholders — technical and nontechnical — then the entire business can make better decisions based on it. As such, they need to make important decisions about how data is collected, stored and analyzed that will affect their wider businesses.
In doing this, customer marketing teams can prove their greater value outside pure marketing activity. This will provide them with solid evidence of their value to present to leadership teams when the time comes to fight for their budgets.
Final Thoughts
The news that marketing budgets are largely increasing again is good. But the evidence shows that it’s still not enough.
Instead of sinking under pressure, marketing teams must see this as an opportunity to improve their efficiency and set a new course for the future of their operations. Many inefficiencies remain in marketing processes today, and now is as good an opportunity as any to set them straight and optimize marketing activities.
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