Determining your Optimal Marketing Communications Budget

Marketing Communications Budgeting

Deciding where your Marketing Communication dollars will go comes down to one simple question, what’s actually working? Sounds simple, but a great number of companies fail to accurately calculate the success of the Marketing campaigns, also known as Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). As with all business plans, we should learn from our past. To accurately determine your optimal Marketing Communications budget you must use the results of previous spending to navigate future spending. Let’s dive into how to calculate your return on marketing investment and the roll that Marketing Analytics plays in the process.

Marketing Analytics

The most powerful tool you can use to gauge the success of your marketing investments is data analytics. Data gives you a way to tangibly measure the impact of your efforts. Obviously the most important data point you’re interested in is profit, but being able to identify which specific efforts are impacting your bottom line can have a great impact on future budgeting. Data can be very insightful but is not always easy to read. Powerful data analytics tools are now available to help you sift through your mountain of data and discover the insights most impactful to your business.

Connect the Dots

The insights that data analytics can offer are only as good as your data collection process. Do you have systems in place to capture all of the data generated from your marketing efforts? If one link is missing in the chain it can skew the findings and potentially lead you in the wrong direction. Not only is it important to capture all your data but managing your data in a central location helps you connect the dots and recognize the true areas of success in your marketing budget.

Listen to the Data

As marketers, we often become attached to a certain idea or campaign we were a part of. The problem is that sometimes we can hold on to things too long and miss out on other opportunities. Data is the ultimate reality check that we desperately need. Listen to the data and let it be the ultimate decision maker in your budgeting.

Once you’ve been able to accurately determine your return on marketing investments, budgeting becomes much less of a guessing game. Take the uncertainty out of your marketing and use data analytics to help validate your decision making.