Create Winning Marketing Budgets: Ongoing Analysis - LISI

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Create Winning Marketing Budgets: Ongoing Analysis

October 9, 2020 | Blog

You’ve done it.   

You’ve created strategic marketing objectives, aligned your goals and plans into a budget focused on innovation, learned everything you can about your marketing budget and expenses, and examined what recurring expenses may increase and which will decrease.   

You’ve presented your strategic marketing objectives, marketing plan, and budget to leadership. Everything is set for next year.   

Now what  

The new year kicks off – and so does your ongoing analysis. This means monitoring expenses, comparing expense to budget numbers, and tracking the ROI of marketing initiatives to be a responsible steward of firm resources.  

Understand what success looks like for your budget

When creating your marketing plan and understanding your budget, you set key performance indicators (KPIs.) At a minimum, review your stats monthly. Monitor your expenses. Look at your marketing statistics. Take the KPIs you established and identify the areas that have the greatest ROI. Provide additional resources in these areas if possible.  

Fail fast  

You have added new marketing initiatives this year. You are regularly monitoring expenses and results. You understand the return on investment (ROI) that your activities are generating. You should be taking chances and trying new things. But monitor the results closely. Adjust programs that are falling behind and keep a close eye on them. Some programs, despite our best efforts, will not be a good fit, and will not be successful. Once you have identified these programs, cut them before you waste a significant amount of time and money.  

Be flexible  

You put a lot of time and effort into creating your marketing plan and budget . . . but that does not mean that it cannot be changed. As you go through the year, don’t pass up valuable marketing opportunities just because they were not part of the original plan. Understand that there will be new opportunities that present themselves, and adjustments will need to be made to the budget. Some initiatives will work and should have additional resources put toward them, and some will fail and should be ended early. Use your strategic marketing objectives and marketing goals to guide you as you determine which opportunities you should pursue and which you should pass on.  

Build your case for next year  

As you evaluate your marketing initiatives throughout the year, consider the impact of your spending on the firm goals. Use this knowledge to start building a case now for a bigger budget next year – and the opportunity to pursue additional innovative marketing strategies.  

Because before you know it, it will be time to create your next marketing budget!  

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