Often times, smaller business marketing teams may compare their marketing and martech budgets to enterprise teams, citing their counterpart’s larger budgets being a fuel to a more successful marketing ROI. But the truth is, the size of your budget (whether small or big) doesn’t have to define your marketing output. The key lies in how you decide what to spend on and more importantly, what to spend on again…

In recent studies, it has been shown that marketing budgets have been on the rise across industries. Every marketer dreams of having more money to run effective multi-channel campaigns with ease along with a strong paid ad model and strategy.

But the fact of the matter is that most of your marketing dollars are probably being wasted. A stricter accountability and measurement process when it comes to evaluating how well marketing and ad campaigns have performed can enable marketing teams to optimize how they spend what they do and why.

The more the budget, the higher the chance of a lot of it going to waste. To avoid this complexity it becomes crucial for marketing leaders to align more than just marketing efforts but also, the efforts that go into investing in new martech systems and how they implement these platforms into other existing technologies already being used by their cross-functional departments.

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Here are a few marketing budget truths that can help ease this grey area for marketing leaders:

Digital Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive

Enterprise teams are allocated larger budgets for most activities because they have the resources and capabilities to do so without hurting other operational requirements. So it’s easy for many smaller to mid-level brand marketers to blame a lack of ROI on lower budgets.

Powerful marketing in a time where customers are demanding more authenticity and relevance through every reach doesn’t have to be expensive.

If marketing leaders understand this, it becomes a basis to choose the right marketing channels along with the right martech systems to fuel the right campaigns, across the right online mediums.

This is where the choice of martech platform matters, based on what the marketing team’s near-term marketing goals and plans are. For a team that wants to pursue a webinar-heavy strategy, an all-in-one webinar tool that can nurture their registrants automatically and drive live attendees and on-demand downloads will be the right way forward. For a marketing team that wants to pursue a webinar-heavy strategy for a quarter or two in parallel with a strong email marketing campaign, a tool that allows the team to integrate both data sets and run marketing campaigns based on both the lists real-time engagement behavior will be impactful in driving ROI without eating into other costs.

Working with Less

Even when marketers are allocated budgets for a particular event, quarter or year, they don’t need to spend all of it. Using some of it to drive current marketing goals and keeping the rest for a future plan that is still in progress of being developed can be more beneficial in not only optimizing real-time performance, processes and activities but also helping in driving future marketing objectives.

Whatever a budget is that a marketer has, trying to work with less and having them assume that they don’t have access to all the funds can actually drive a more optimized process that prevents waste in terms of marketing spend.

Another way to drive better budget impact is by having marketers a total budget for a period of time (a quarter) or a campaign but giving them access to say a percentage of it for the first couple of weeks while unlocking the rest only if a certain ROI is achieved through the initial stages.

Adapting a more Stringent Marketing Measurement Strategy

Understanding where to curb marketing expenses and where to allocate further budgets is the key to driving a more optimized marketing process. This is where the right martech tools and marketing measurement strategy need to come into play.

Dedicated marketing executives that can run the martech stack and pull out relevant insights while also comparing behavioral data for multiple campaigns/channels play a key role here in driving this optimization.

Ready reports within martech dashboards make it easier for marketers to pull the right insights to try and redefine future campaign spends or reallocate budgets to areas/efforts that prove to be working well.

Last Thoughts

No marketing budget can be considered as ‘’the right budget’’ just like no martech stack can be the perfect stack for a long period of time. All of these elements need to be constantly measured and changed depending on evolving marketing plans and market dynamics. A marketing team that has been pursuing a webinar-heavy strategy in the past but decides to pursue a podcast-heavy strategy in the next quarter will need a slight rejig of the kind of martech tools and processes they currently deploy and the same basis holds true for any marketing budget.

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