In recent weeks I have met with seven potential clients who all admitted to me that they don’t have - and have never had - a defined marketing budget for their company.
Instead, the owner/CEO tends to take a look at each marketing opportunity individually, as it comes up, and makes a gut decision whether to go for it or not. It’s a bit like Julius Caesar giving the ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumbs-down’ at the end (well, almost the end) of a to-the-death gladiator fight.
Each CEO then proceeded to inform me that they are aware and convinced of the importance of marketing within their respective companies. Yet, to me, the lack of any marketing budget reveals the real truth: consciously or unconsciously, they see marketing as a cost rather than an investment.
Whether you’re a one-man-band organization, or a stockmarket-listed multinational, you need to allocate an amount of money to be your company’s marketing fund and plan how you’re going to spend it. A plan puts a stick in the ground and points out direction. The budget allows you to make decisions as to what you’re going to do, when, and where.
Without having both of these elements in place, your company’s marketing cannot be anything else than disjointed, inefficient, ineffective, wasteful - and even damaging to your company’s business value. You have no way of knowing whether your marketing is succeeding, since you haven’t decided on how you're going to measure it.
However, just because you have a plan doesn’t mean that you’re bound to blindly execute it, lemming-like. Nothing’s written in stone.
But it’s a lot easier to change a plan when you already have a plan to change.
Image courtesy of KEXINO
