For anyone who’s in charge of a marketing budget, and rapidly approaching the end of their organization’s financial year, it’s a tricky time. Because closing out the financial year over budget is generally frowned upon. But so is finishing the financial year with budgeted funds un-spent. What to do at the 11th hour?
If sales are strong and the business is generally headed in the right direction, coming in slightly over the agreed-upon marketing budget might be forgiven. Many marketers have been in that situation. But what about the opposite – coming in under budget?
At first glance, saving your organization some money should surely be a good thing. Someone, somewhere – invariably higher up the tree – is going to be happy, because unspent marketing dollars will be used to balance someone else’s budget.
But the conundrum for a marketing leader is that finishing the financial year under budget may be deemed as an inability to manage your budget tightly. (“What do you mean ‘an event was cancelled and you didn’t spend that $30k elsewhere’?”)
Even worse, scrutiny of the marketing budget you have just submitted for the forthcoming financial year will intensify. (“How can you ask for an increase on last year’s budget when you only spent 85% of what you had?”)
The answer to this conundrum is Simple, which allows marketing managers to ensure that the jobs and campaigns coming through their team are tightly managed and reported on.
Jobs running over or under budget can quickly be surfaced through Simple’s ability to customize reports for your organization. Every job or project can have a budget applied to it, and that data point can be tracked and reported on throughout the financial year. If you can quarantine the funds from your unspent budget for a smart deployment of Simple’s Marketing Operations platform, the efficiencies to be gained are enormous. Which throws up another conundrum for marketers.
What if Simple results in significant reductions in what you spend on marketing operations next year, but you just don’t know it yet?
It might be the number of staff you need to run your marketing department, or a reduction in the time you spend briefing internal design studios or external agencies, or it could be the significant drop in back-and-forth required when reviewing and approving marketing assets. Coming in way under budget could backfire.
A suggestion? For the cost of a dozen or so Simple licences, you can grab next year’s marketing budget by the scruff of the neck and squeeze every drop of inefficiency out of it. We’ll show you how to save time and money, as well as tightly manage spending for the next financial year.
And what to do with those savings? We’ll leave that to your creative marketing brain…
Read Next: The 10 Hidden Costs of Poor Marketing Process
Simple's Marketing Operations Cloud helps marketing teams plan, review and optimise marketing to create profitable customer experiences for less. Contact a member of our team to learn more.