Prove it or lose it: 3 ways to secure your marketing budget for 2023 | Acxiom | Open mic

Marketing budgets are, by default, a critical component of a marketing team’s ability to drive positive results for their brands. With budgeting season in full swing, Tate Olinghouse of Acxiom, chief client officer, shares three actions marketing departments can take to secure their fair share of the budget.

It’s fall, and for many countries that means it’s Halloween season, so here’s a scary story that’s been running through my head. It’s a true story, and it takes place in a meeting I attended with a major brand. The brand’s CEO looked at the marketing director across the table and asked, “If I give you an additional $10 million in marketing budget, how many more customers can you bring us?”

The silence.

“Or if I withdraw $10 million, how much revenue will that cost us?”

Again, the CMO had no response. Within six months, the CMO was gone.

Okay, so it’s not quite a classic scare night, but it’s a very real and very scary situation for any marketing leader. And that proves how high the stakes are.

The moral of the story is: prove it or lose it. If you can’t prove the value of your marketing budget, someone else will decide it for you.

Prove it or lose it

Fall is budget planning season, when marketers, like everyone else in their organization, find themselves competing for a limited pool of cash.

The story’s marketing director made a fatal mistake in his career. They forgot the two basic premises that anyone who builds a budget record must master. First, budgets should be set based on the stakeholder value they will ultimately deliver. And second, the value must be demonstrated by empirical facts – real business results.

Marketers must be able to tie proposed strategies to specific business outcomes. And those results can usually be boiled down to customer acquisition, customer retention, customer growth, or some combination.

It sounds pretty formulaic, and that’s the point. If you can’t prove with logic and data that you’re creating value, then good luck securing your budget going forward, especially in a market with potential economic uncertainties.

Acxiom CEO Chad Engelgau recently wrote about choose the right CDP, and his advice applies to any marketing investment requiring a large budget. He said, “It’s imperative that you understand the business objective you’re trying to achieve and the technology gap you’re trying to bridge.”

Here are three ways to ensure you have a successful budget planning season and ultimately a successful marketing strategy:

1. Focus on what you can control (and measure)

The logic is clear. To make better data-driven investment decisions, you need to define your business goals, execute proven strategies against those goals, and fuel your feedback and learning loops with the right mix of response data.

Although easy in theory, how do brands set themselves up for success? It’s about knowing what you can control. The following elements should be part of any marketing process:

● Understand the data important to the challenge or use case you have chosen.

● Connect your customer engagement data to a persistent identity backbone to get a complete view of your customers and how they interact with your brand.

● Use a privacy-compliant environment where you can operate on data and examine it in a way that is not only compliant but, more importantly, respectful of consumer privacy.

● Build the analytical models that give you the information you need to prove what works and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to pivot your strategies to proven tactics.

These pieces give you the numbers behind the strategy, i.e. the evidence you need to validate your budget requests.

2. Don’t be dazzled by technology

What makes marketers lose sight of the facts? I’ve worked with hundreds of brands and seen too many marketers get easily distracted by shiny new toys hitting the market or causing a stir in the market. LUMAscape.

This is not a new story – marketing technology will always evolve. DMPs came on the scene and people rushed to invest in them, even if they didn’t fully understand them. Same with CDPs. Ditto with clean rooms.

Do not mistake yourself. They are amazing tools. But they are just that: tools for specific tasks. They are great at what they do, but they don’t solve everything. Marketers need to be very clear about what they’re trying to achieve – the business outcome – and they need to know what success looks like, so they can show it worked (or didn’t work) later. .

The stakes are simply too high. Facts should guide investment decisions. This is why proven direct marketing methods are still popular. they have a history of proven and measurable effectiveness. Demonstrating which channels and technologies work for your business isn’t just about scope; it is essential to the management of your investment decisions.

When it comes to new technologies, make sure you don’t add items to the budget just because of FOMO (fear of missing out).

3. Experiment sometimes, always measure

Of course, marketers will always want to explore the latest trends and technologies – and they should. Innovation should be part of your investment equation.

There is no single rule that says you should spend 5% or 25% of your resources experimenting with new solutions or innovating new proofs of concept. For example, if you are a small organization, you may need to commit more, relatively speaking, to create a meaningful innovation budget.

Regardless of your separation, it’s important to treat everything as a formal experience. You understand the business outcome you want to achieve and you measure, measure, measure, so you can demonstrate your success before you make those crucial investment decisions.

It may not be easy, but it’s worth it

Proving your strategy, tactics, and spend will result in the results you want for your brand is Business 101, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Smart marketers (and smart budgeters) use a combination of data and technology to know what works and where to invest. They also leave room for experimentation and innovation. But perhaps more importantly, they commit to always measuring – even if the results show there is room for improvement. This is how we all learn and improve.

If your CEO asks you what results you will achieve with the budget you request, will you survive the grill? It is best to define your strategy now, to avoid the risk of a horror story in the conference room.