2010: A Marketing Budget Odyssey

Budget Strategy and ROI (Part 1 of 6)

By Andrew Davis and Scott Loring

This series asks the tough questions about evolving marketing strategies and the benefits and returns you should plan for and expect.

Step right up and place your budget bets!

Let’s start the dialogue about how marketing will be dramatically different in 2010. Discussing this year’s budget cycle, the hope is to cut through the hype of Marketing 2.0 and zoom in on the core reality of what budget bets you will actually be making.

How will you spend your marketing dollars in 2010?  What are the buckets — digital and traditional? How will you justify each of them?

Success through the squeeze

How will you measure marketing success? By now, the acronym ROI is the dead horse in the corner of your CFO’s office –  but will Return On Investment be the only way to measure your marketing spend effectiveness in 2010?

Thought your 2009 budget planning was tough? This year will demand far more marketing results from far fewer marketing dollars. But to what end? And how is it different from last year?

More effective … and more obvious

We are all too aware that the advertising belt continues to tighten. Forrester reports the overall decline, yet their report leads with the fact that the online/interactive portions of marketing budgets are poised for healthy growth. Why? Because these dollars can be spent in a more effective, more focused manner.

Masters of the obvious, you say? Decreased spending is the springboard for defining and planning for 2010 digital marketing success.

Take the first step

The first step in 2010 marketing planning is to ask yourself, “What are my real goals?  How do I measure success? How will this approach help me avoid the CFO’s budget beat-down I received in 2009?”

Will it start and end with quarterly revenue growth, or will it be more subtle … perhaps more enlightened? How about digging deeper and measuring something more valuable in the short and long term, like digital influence?  Digital influence captures the real impact on your target consumer base and is less about return on (short-term) investment, and more about driving real return on influence.

Let’s stop counting the so-called “valuable” leads garnered from that webinar you produced in Q1 (thanks friends and family for logging in).

Start monitoring audience interaction with your content, both on your site and beyond.  There is value there. Maybe you won’t see it in this quarter’s revenue, but the momentum gathered there will fuel your sales for years to come.

Please pipe in.

Comment below with your concerns about your 2010 marketing budget.

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."