Get Out the Green Eyeshades: Budget Season Looms
Every year we go through the process of setting the next year’s marketing budget.
Even though we know it’s coming, we are seldom prepared. As a result, the budgeting process becomes a defensive scramble to justify spend, and often the way it’s approached is to open this year’s budget spreadsheet and click on “File/Save As” to create next year’s template.
Besides the fact that the document you just copied is probably not an accurate reflection of spend to date, just re-spinning last year’s model isn’t going to help drive your marketing organization to greater levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
Here are a few suggestions for getting the budgeting process off to a better start:
- Strategy first, then budget. Identify the goals that will impact marketing’s actions for the next year. Look at corporate, sales and business unit goals and identify the interlock points with these other groups that drive marketing’s priorities.
- Determine your marketing priorities. Use the goals to drive your plan. When you understand your key marketing initiatives, consider defining a needs-based campaign strategy and identify the key areas of focus.
- Communicate your choices. Gain agreement from sales and the business units (or product/solution teams) that will be impacted by the choices that marketing makes.
- Choose a budget model. From centralized to solution-oriented, there are important trade-offs to make. If you are using a campaign model, then you can build your budget around the principles of campaign design, prioritization and allocation.
- Put on those green eyeshades. Build a top-down budget allocation model based on proportional distribution of your budget to the different areas of priority.
A portion of this blog post is republished with permission from SiriusDecisions, Inc. To read the full post, please visit: http://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/get-out-the-green-eyeshades-budget-season-looms/.
By Craig Moore, from: http://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/get-out-the-green-eyeshades-budget-season-looms/
Craig Moore is Service Director, Marketing Operations Strategies, at SiriusDecisions. His three decades of experience span such areas as marketing operations, partner marketing, strategic alliances, product marketing and management, software development and entrepreneurship.