2020 marketing budget: don’t forget performance marketing!

The release of Gartner’s annual study of marketing budgets for CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers or Marketing Directors) is always eagerly awaited. In fact, this publication enables you to measure your business against the biggest current trends so you can plan your future marketing budget. The most important thing to aim for is an almost perfect balance between the 4 areas of major expenditure, namely, agencies, technological solutions (MarTech), advertising purchases and personnel costs.

It is almost impossible for an advertiser to dictate a steady growth in its marketing budget year on year. The aim is therefore not to spend more, but to spend better. And we have a few suggestions and tips to help you with this.

Budget priorities – knowledge, data and analysis

CMOS primarily drive their business first and forement based on KPIs. And to optimise these, you have to invest in knowledge. This is why market research and marketing analysis (market, trend, competition, etc.) are such top priorities. It’s a logical decision in a sense. In a world that is more and more intangible, relying on instinct alone is far from efficient. You therefore need the right data to make the right decisions at the right time. According to Gartner, 76% of marketers say they rely on data and analytics to make key decisions.

It is therefore important to set a significant portion of your budget aside for:

• Tools capable of harvesting and analysing high-quality data.
• Systems for measuring the customer experience.
• Platforms for understanding the impact of the operations conducted in order to measure their ROI.

This data and these tools sustain the marketing work and strategy to help adjust actions in a constantly changing world.

2020: the year of collaboration and participatory intelligence

Far too many companies operate in isolation. As a result, marketing is isolated from sales, customer support and communication. To remedy this, 2020 must be the year of transversality and collaborative work.

So you also have to invest in:

• Training, especially in project management, lean management, creativity seminars, etc.
• Collaborative tools like Asana or MS Project.
• Klipfolio or Power BI dashboarding tools to extract key KPIs from your data and share them with the right people.
• Instant messaging tools like Slack to facilitate collaboration.

By promoting better communication and collaboration between departments, it will be easier to work in harmony together and therefore serve your clients better. As such, it is important not to neglect dissatisfied customers, because they are often the ones who provide the most valuable feedback in terms of what needs changing or developing further.

Construct a budget that cuts down on risk-taking

With performance marketing, advertisers pay only if their actions get results. This might be a click on a link, adding an item to a basket, a payment, a confirmation, downloading an application, etc.

Advertisers, therefore, have great agility in terms of controlling their budget. And you get this agility from campaign management. With affiliation, it’s easy to turn round and adapt your message or offer. Is there a banner that is underperforming? Or disappointing opening rates for a marketing email campaign? It’s easy to correct the real-time trajectory so you can optimise your time and budget.

Set goals before you get started, with performance marketing. These KPIs can then be used to compare real-time results against initial expectations. Because the goal here is not to spend less. A user who doesn’t click on a link is a user who doesn’t cost anything. On the other hand, this may highlight some adjustments you need to make for optimising your budget.

Constructing a new budget is never an easy time for a chief marketing officer or marketing director. They always have to prove that their strategy is the right one and measure the return on investment all while optimising their resources. Working with the right people is therefore essential. With a specialised agency, marketing can take advantage of third-party expertise at a lower cost, while ensuring that actions are successful through performance marketing. It’s a win-win situation that should fit every budget!