Developing a Marketing Budget for 2014

Developing a Marketing Budget for 2014

It’s August. The annual exercise that is budgeting has begun and questions are floating my way. There are countless resources to help you with the numbers, the justification and the admonishment to “measure”. I’m comfortable leaving the budgeting details for you to figure out in order to talk to my bigger company brothers and sisters about your marketing self image.

Yep. Self image.

I’m knee deep in the book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Dr Martin Seligman. I won’t try to paraphrase it here, but suffice it to say that behind the eyes and between the ears lies our biggest challenge. Convincing ourselves that we’re worthy of all sorts of things.

Coupling the book and the recent questions it occurred to me, budget meetings are rife with self image issues. In most functional businesses, the allocation of funds for the coming year is a prioritization issue. We can find the money, our problem is how to prioritize where it goes.

Sales, operations, and finance are full of self-worth and confidence  in stark contrast to marketing teams. They’re better at prioritizing their activities and needs. Marketing gets told what to do.

That begs the question, how can you use that knowledge to help with your department’s budgeted funds?

Start with this internal conversation:

What are the objectives?
How will we measure the outcome? and
What is the value to our organization? (both hard and soft measures)

Objectives are hard to pin down in a large organization. I wish I knew the exact machinations behind this quirk, but it always feels like it has something to do with not wanting to be wrong. Whether it’s coming in too high or coming in too low, putting forth a realistic objective is a challenge but you can do it.

Measurements are easier to come up with, but due to their reliance on the Objective, they suffer from the same hand-wringing dread. No one wants to pick the wrong thing to measure. (don’t let it stop you)

Value is the fuel for self image. If you can measure it, there’s a way to extract a hard value. If you can define the result, you can pull out the soft measures too. What’s it worth to the VP of Sales to see an improvement in sales lead quality? What does it do for the CFO to have visibility into the pre-sales pipeline? Soft measures.

Back to those budget meetings and self-worth.

Sales teams, by virtue of being the ones that collect the check, operate in this way and when it comes to budget time, are extremely confident. Self assured. They have objectives, measures and are used to talking about value.

Marketing teams, not so much.

Let’s change that. If you’re in budget mode, start by digging out those objectives and understanding how they’ll be measured. Take a whirl at having your internal customers define the value. (no guessing – let them tell you in their own words) Then, devise a plan for getting there.

If it’s a good plan, you’ll be confident in prioritizing the funds to make it happen. No more % of sales or % increase over last year. Bleh. Dig in and make something happen.

You’re worth it.

Good stuff.