3 ways to cut your marketing budget and still keep smiling

More on: www.icewebinars.com

It’s planning time… The economy is not flourishing yet, to put it mildly. Companies are facing difficulties in keeping shareholders happy by reducing risks, assembling enough “armor” to shield against continued economic adversities and at the same time planning to show healthy numbers. What does this mean for the marketer? Pressure on the budgets, just like there was in previous years. Here are three tips for responsible budget cutting :

1. Apply the cutter where the expected impact is lowest.
Cutting “across the board” is simple enough: if your budget needs to drop 10% then simply cut every item by 10% and you’ll be laughing again! Big danger: some items are impacted more by the cut than others. You risk affecting the end result by more than 10%. Furthermore, you’ll find that other items cannot be cut at all: the sponsorship program that you committed to for three years or the CEO dinner party that the boss really likes. Think in terms of impact, not activities.

2. Keep a fixed part of your budget for innovation and experimentation.
Cutting “what we are unsure of” may be a sensible choice, not? If we don’t know what a particular program will bring us next year, we will de-prioritise it for the benefit of others. Big danger: you’ll be cutting away innovative programs that may be your future winners. Moreover, elements that are not as measurable as e.g. your homepage, are not necessarily bad. Your future customer may even like them! Remember that experimentation is what made online and social marketing big.

3. Take what worked well in the past and use it to justify next year’s programs.
Cutting “everything that does not contribute to the sales targets”: ahh… that’s and old one isn’t it? This easily leads to long discussions about the role of marketing (long-term?) and the role of sales (short-term?), especially in B2B. If your role is tactical sales support only, than no problem: just start cutting and lean closely towards the sales teams. But if your company depends on product innovation, if the sales cycles for high value products can be long, if long-lasting customer relationships are key to your success or if you are in a complex value chain beware: you’ll risk squandering future opportunities. Recommended action: try to find evidence of how marketing contributed to some very successful customer accounts, and still does. Create some “engagement routes” a customer could follow to grow from nothing to ambassador, plotted in time. Use this to make your case.

And of course: keep smiling, it’s just part of the job!

If you want some more tips, please check out: www.icewebinars.com