These days marketers are asking for more investments in customer experience in response to and obvious shift in consumer behavior. However, increasing the marketing budget's size should be properly negotiated with senior company staff. Consider the following tips to prepare for such an important conversation:
Keep track of everything
If you are attending a tradeshow, ensure that every meaningful conversation is recorded and every business card collected. If you are a webinar host, keep track of attendees, registrants and whoever asks questions. Every new program should be measured after being deployed. Keeping track of critical program elements, conversion rates and recording costs is crucial to understanding measurements such as cost per customer, cost per opportunity, cost per lead and at the end, how all these factors contribute to revenue.
Listing
To sum it up, take everything in your hands and ensure that every marketing-related issue like social events, emails and advertising is related to the corresponding accounts and leads. There is no excuse for not doing so as all this information is very important when marketing activity relates to revenue. If the need calls for it, consider hiring a marketing operations employee to keep track on reporting and analysis. With the latest innovations in marketing technology and the tracking capabilities of today, there shouldn't be unaccounted for marketing revenue.
Create a stable forecast
You shouldn't leave this to the sales department. Take initiative and outline exactly how your strategy plays into the overall marketing strategy of your company to support revenue margins. You should be able to demonstrate why and how your plan is expected to work by combining predicted outcomes for new investments with historical performance data. You must also supply the numbers to back up your
requirements for budget increase in support of the sales process.
Provide reports often and be transparent about your activities
Take part in weekly meetings, outlining how your activity has supported the revenue goals of the company. If you have missed something in your forecasts, inform the team in time, letting them knows what has caused the problem and how you plan to fix it. You won't be correct every single time. Instead, be prepared to learn from your mistakes and adjust accordingly.
Acknowledge that you can't accomplish everything by yourself
Use the inexpensive services of freelancers. Your company may be able to create a new website for USD 20,000 but sometimes a freelancer can do just the same job, producing a website that will cost you only USD 5,000 and yet solve the same problem. Although, it is sometimes difficult to introduce outsiders to the specific needs of your business, working with contractors can lower the cost of a project substantially.
Perform tests and optimize results
If you can prove in front of Finance that you were successful in reducing customer acquisition costs by 35 per cent or have been able to increase website conversion rates significantly, they will love it.
If you track all the company's marketing-related activities in just the same way it is done by the BlueHat Marketing Company , you should have sufficient data to present a clear picture of what will work and what will not. As a marketer, you must have a solid understanding on where the firm should step up investment efforts and where costs should be cut instead.
Author
Phong Thai is a Web Developer, Web Coder for 20 years with PHP, JavaScript, CSS. He is the creator of JavaScriptBank.com - provide thousands of free JavaScript code examples, web development tips and tricks, helpful blogging guides.twitter@js_bank or connect with him on facebook@jsbank if you want. His websites for your knowledge: javascriptON.com , inOneSec.com , www.gomymobi.com