Dossier: Successful marketing budgets and plans in 2024

Summer is slowly changing into autumn, the annual cue for the opening of the "budget season." Time to fire up the roulette wheel; redistribute marketing investments on gut feel, driven by the resources provided by management. Or are you doing it differently this year?

In the ever-changing world of marketing, it can be challenging for CMOs to determine the correct marketing budget. The economic landscape and technological advances in the marketing industry calls for a new approach to budgeting.

Companies are unaware of the enormous the cost of bad customer experiences. Out-of-pocket costs such as customer service are being pushed up, at a time when it’s becoming more difficult and expensive to find new customers.And this is happening while the brand credibility is declining and there is erosion in terms of new business development.

Data has been vital for some time now in demonstrating whether a marketing and sales strategy is a hit or a miss. However, the discussion is still dominated by gut feeling when analysing why strategies fail and what needs to be radically changed. By removing emotion from the boardroom, we raise marketing and sales efficiency. In the past, marketing strategies were based on what had already happened. Today, we have a high degree of predictability. Digital marketing has never been so close to certainty.

In our work with clients we see that there’s an increasing focus on effective, goal-oriented marketing communications. Data dashboards that show ‘more conversions’ and ‘more sales’ at a glance are preferred when reporting to the boardroom. But this carries a risk too. It might be a good time for brand managers to ask themselves: are the most obvious tactics also the most impactful ones?

Digital marketing offers enormous opportunities in the field of data-driven working. We often fail to take advantage of these opportunities. That's means you miss out on a lot of opportunities to maximise the impact of your budget.

At iO, we get to support a lot of national and international organisations in the area of digital marketing. One of the tools we use to allocate marketing budgets as efficiently as possible is Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). While this may sound new and unfamiliar to the ears, it's a technique that has been used as early as the 1980s and 1990s to clarify the impact of marketing spending on sales. But what exactly does MMM entail and why is it so essential when planning marketing budgets for 2024?