4 Simple Tips for Making the Most of Your Marketing Budget

As every senior marketer knows, it’s essential to squeeze every last drop of value from your marketing budget. With boardroom expectations high, you need to be able to not only get maximum results supported by data, but also by customer experiences.

Follow these actionable tips, taken from the Marketing Budgets 2016 report (Oracle Marketing Cloud, Econsultancy) to get maximum bang for your marketing buck...

1. Introduce Consumer Numbers into the Boardroom

Financial data is clearly important, but do you ever get the feeling that customer experience is being neglected at board level? If the conversation is only about financial stats, you need to make a change.

Great experiences lead to great finances. Or to put it another way: if you aren’t measuring and managing your customer experience, your financial performance is sure to suffer sooner or later.

We’re not focused on the numbers. We’re focused on the things that produce the numbers.

- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

Senior marketers must insist on board level measurement and management of:

• Consumer activity
• Consumer sentiment
• Consumer satisfaction

Remember: What gets measured, gets managed!

2. Optimise Impact, Forget Format

Guess what? Traditional marketing isn’t quite so dead after all. Despite the much-vaunted social media revolution and the move to digital, consumers are still present on non-digital platforms.

New media coexists with broadcast and even print; consumers move seamlessly across channels depending on activity, time of day and many other factors. Often they engage with both simultaneously (ever browsed Facebook while watching TV?).

Marketers should stop thinking ‘traditional vs digital’ and instead allocate marketing spend according to the purpose of the interaction and the desired impact. These will guide the formats you choose.

3. Embrace Experimentation

Marketers should be free to experiment with new formats and the way existing channels are used.

- Marketing Budgets 2016 (Oracle, Econsultancy)

Consumer behaviour is changing rapidly all the time. To have any hope of keeping up, marketers must embrace and implement a culture of innovation and experimentation.

If you fall behind your prospective or existing customers, you’re in trouble. But on the flip side, experimenting and innovating your way ahead of competitors can leave you in a stronger and more lucrative position.

How to make experimentation part of the culture:

• Dedicate a budget for experimentation
• Praise and reward innovation in team members
• Demonstrate value of experimentation in improved financial performance
• Incentivise new ways of reaching goals
• Get the board on board—you need buy-in at all levels

4. Prioritise Validated Learning

Data removes the need to assume. It gives marketers power to extract powerful insights and apply those to assign and spend budget in the most intelligent way. Don’t roll out large, expensive programmes before they’re proven—test and measure first.

We now have the ability to get data on all our different marketing activities. You can test assumptions about your brand, products, customer understanding and consumer preferences more easily and effectively than ever before.

The resulting insights can apply beyond individual marketing campaigns. Data can feed into brand, product and even organisational developments. Knowledge is power—why not use it to improve performance on all fronts?

If the adage "what gets measured, gets managed" is true, and improving the customer experience is truly a priority throughout the company, then measuring, reporting and analysing this at the board level is a must.

- Marketing Budgets 2016 (Oracle Marketing Cloud, Econsultancy)

Main Takeaways

• Don’t lose sight of customer experience—this needs to be measured at board level, just like financials
• Optimise impact, forget format: choose media based on what you want to achieve, not on a ‘traditional vs new media’ split
• Building in experimentation and innovation can be a secret weapon to get you ahead

Find out how marketing budgets are evolving, and what you need to do to get optimum results from yours. Download Marketing Budgets 2016, part of the Modern Marketing Actionable Insights Series, now.

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