How to Get Your Marketing Budget Approved

Why are business leaders reluctant to adequately fund marketing efforts? They’ve invested a lot in marketing and have never really been able to see a direct return. It’s likely they’ve also been burned by bad marketing in the past.

But you’re going to do things differently. Build them a plan that shows how marketing will be a driver of business growth. Your leaders speak the language of profit and loss. You’ll get their attention by being tuned-in to the finances and business goals of the company.

By having a solid plan, understanding the numbers, holding marketing accountable, and being aligned with sales, you’ll be much more likely to get — and keep — the attention of your leadership team when you’re presenting your case.

Make Marketing Accountable: Have a Tracking and Attribution Methodology

Many organizations lack diligent tracking and attribution methods. Business growth success is attributed to the “last touch”: the salesperson. Without a way to track sales activity back to marketing, marketing is seen as a money pit.

Make sure that your team knows that your marketing plan includes being accountable to the bottom line of the business. Reassure them about your ability to track leads and wins from sales back to the marketing source. This will not only help them have more faith in your plan, but it will also help you decide where to spend more time and effort in the future.

Making the Business Case

Let’s face it, your leadership team is confused about a lot of aspects of marketing. They may not understand search marketing or digital advertising. They’ve also seen a lot of random acts of marketing that they haven’t been able to tie to business results.

To get to the kind of marketing that drives business results, you need to understand the business goals and show how your plan aligns with them. Show leadership that you have a grasp of this by presenting your marketing plan's goals and targets. If you don’t have historic data to base your numbers on, come up with relatively conservative set-up numbers that you feel your efforts can attain.

When building your plan, you'll need to gather some numbers:

• Current cost of acquiring a lead
• Number of leads required to win new business and close rates
• Current cost of acquiring new business
• Sales goals for the month/quarter/year
• Business growth goals over time
• Average Deal Size (potentially a per business unit/category number)
• Customer retention/customer growth rates

If you want to get business leaders on your side, metrics are the key to determining your return on marketing investments.

Tracking ROI and measuring marketing performance will help you demonstrate the value of marketing. Customer lifetime value should be leaned on heavily. This may help you get more marketing funding in the future. You may fall short of ideal ROI if your work is judged on the value of the first sale only.

When developing metrics, you can calculate your customer’s lifetime value (CLV) and assess its significance using the formula:

Sales and marketing are not enemies. Both teams need to work together to meet the common goal of making more money for the business. HubSpot defines the alignment between sales and marketing as “smarketing.”

Get members of the sales team on your side by sharing their mindset. Ask yourself, What are their sales goals? Who are their top accounts? The marketing pipeline should be tied to sales goals.

Account-Based Marketing

Your team probably has a list of key accounts that they want to prospect into. Marketing and sales are often misaligned when it comes to the accounts that marketing is bringing in and those that sales wants to go after. Work to understand your sales team's target market and their top accounts. Bring them an account-based marketing plan. That will get them excited about your work.

If you're not testing, you're not optimizing. If you're not optimizing, you're staying in the same place.

Make sure that your team understands that modern marketing involves continual experimentation. We're no longer in a world where building a website or landing page is a set-it-and-forget-it project. These tactics need to be continually tweaked, experimented with, and optimized for the best possible outcomes.

Optimization shouldn’t have an end date: a performance marketing team should always be looking to optimize, even when they feel they've achieved good business outcomes.

Overcoming the Fear of Testing

Performance marketers fail all the time. The thing that sets good marketers apart is that they fail forward.

They learn from their mistakes and put marketing systems in place that are agile enough that they can optimize quickly. Experimentation and failure are the keys to growth.