The pillarization of marketing budgets

[arzina221]

Marketing budget the same as last year
The latest research by Multiscope and Lewis PR shows that most Dutch marketers kept their budget the same in 2013 compared to the year before. In addition, increasing interaction with the customer has become the most important marketing objective of 2013. In order to realize this objective, 35% of marketers will spend more budget on social media marketing.

It all sounds logical. What the research has taken into account is to what extent the budgets are interchangeable during the year. In other words, on what basis does the marketer justify his or her decision to make a subsequent investment in social media marketing? Because these euros contribute most to achieving the objective in this way? Or because a budget was set for social media last autumn?


Inbound marketing in blocks
For example, take a look at the infographic on inbound marketing , which describes in five steps how to build a good site, generate traffic, convert traffic into leads, convert leads into customers and finally measure everything. This is a nice, simplified representation of the responsibilities of a marketing department. Traditionally, the marketing department has a budget for each block mentioned here.

But unfortunately all too often with Chinese walls uae phone data in between. Within the block 'generating traffic' there are usually still shifts to be realized (from Adwords to Display, from branding to performance), but if you read the budgeting advice on the blogs, it is rarely advised to choose a holistic approach. Which in practice does not happen.

Countless times I have noticed that even internationally operating companies did not have the budget available to implement technology that demonstrably (talking about measuring) realizes a 50% higher lead conversion. But it was no problem at all to get a three times higher budget for an additional retargeting campaign.

Pillarization of budgets is suboptimal
In my opinion, compartmentalization of budgets for media and onsite conversion optimization leads to suboptimal use of the marketing budget. The aforementioned holistic approach uses the principle that for every euro you spend on marketing, you consider within which marketing discipline it will yield the most. And again with the next euro.

This will be a change in thinking, and it may require a different setup of the marketing organization. But start by removing the Chinese walls between the different marketing budgets. The organization will follow automatically.