3 tips to tackle the annual marketing budget challenge

Creating the annual marketing budget is notoriously challenging. Trying to justify every line item to finance teams that don’t understand marketing can be frustrating and overwhelming. This article explores practical tips for navigating the annual budgeting process smoothly.

1. Appoint a lead to run the annual budget planning process

In a perfect world, someone on the marketing operations team manages the overall marketing budget, working closely with a trusted finance partner. I’ve personally experienced this utopia, but most marketers have not. 

In a lot of companies, budgeting is a hot mess. The finance team doesn’t understand marketing, the marketing team doesn’t understand accounting, and it all results in people speaking different languages and getting frustrated.

The simplest solution is to assign the budget process to one person. The CMO should give this person the authority to run the process as they see fit and require all budget owners to follow. This individual should:

• Be the finance team’s single point of contact and the CMO’s voice about budget topics. 
• Plan enablement sessions, a calendar of events/milestones and a structured hand-holding process that doesn’t cause stress or frustration across the team.

Ideally, the budget lead should be from the MOps team because they can bring objectivity. They should focus on what benefits the entire department, not just a particular team or individual. The annual planning process needs to be systematic and based on data, avoiding subjective or personal biases.

Dig deeper: 5 ways MOps can elevate the annual planning process

2. Prioritize costs based on impact

All costs are not created equal. You can’t lump your contracted costs for technology in the same bucket as a tentative regional breakfast event in Paris in September. You can’t lump your costs for huge trade shows like Dreamforce with costs for the agency that helps make beautiful PowerPoint presentations.

I like to start the budget process by identifying costs that fall into one of these two groups:

• Under contract, can’t be broken.
• Absolutely mission crucial for the business to run.

These are mostly subscription costs for technology but include costs for items like your annual customer event or your performance marketing agency that you could never bring in-house due to headcount constraints.

Once every budget owner has identified these mission-critical costs, I then identify costs that fall into another bucket:

• If we didn’t spend some amount of money on this, then what’s the point of even having that function within marketing?

This bucket includes:

• The minimum amount of paid media spend needed to justify having a digital marketing team meet the company KPIs.
• Partner marketing costs.
• Local field marketing event.

This bucket’s real check and balance is whether losing this budget would render the team/person completely ineffective. And if the answer is yes, then you need to decide what’s more important: Having that person/team and giving them the budget or not having the team at all?

The final bucket includes what I consider “nice to haves.” Without these items, the teams could still be effective, the business would still run, and at the end of the year, no one would remember or notice the impact of this budget not being spent.

This money is typically for testing, experimentation and growth. It could be given back if cuts are needed, but it could also be increased if the business is running well and more money is available than expected.

Dig deeper: The budget bottleneck: How to get more from your marketing budget

3. Avoid hard-coding budgets

A mistake I often see marketing teams make is locking themselves into a hard-coded budget for the year. As soon as the budget is finalized, every team should begin evaluating what they have planned for the year and whether they will need more/less of it.

If those local breakfast events the field marketers ran in Q4 showed no signs of pipeline coming into Q1, then maybe those dollars should be reallocated to another team. Just because they are in the budget doesn’t mean they can’t be canceled.

If a key product marketer leaves the company and there’s no one to create a new ebook, those dollars should be reallocated to another team rather than someone else producing a below-par piece of content.

If that new LinkedIn paid social strategy just isn’t bringing in the quality of leads expected, then maybe those dollars should be reallocated to another team.

Remember that person who was put in charge of the annual budget process? That person should meet weekly or monthly with each budget owner to review what has been spent, what is planned to be spent, and whether or not the spend results in the expected ROI. 

After every meeting, there will be some variance above or below the planned budget, and it’s critical to ensure that extra spend is accounted for or that under-spend is reallocated.

Dig deeper: Communicating martech’s value in a slowing economy

Navigating the annual budgeting process smoothly

The annual marketing budget process doesn’t have to be dreaded. By appointing a budget lead, prioritizing costs based on impact and relevance, and avoiding hard-coded budgets, marketing teams can navigate the process smoothly. The result should be that marketers feel confident about the amount of money they have available to spend and the process by which their money was allocated.

The key is open communication between marketing and finance to ensure dollars are allocated to the highest-priority initiatives that will drive business impact. With the right framework, the marketing budget can become a strategic asset rather than a source of annual frustration. 

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