MarTech includes a wide spectra of tools, which includes email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), social media marketing, content marketing and more. Every single one of these tools are extremely important for the marketer. If the budgets are cut down, the marketers are forced to take up decisions on their own and prioritize only on the most important ones. This causes a slack in the marketing ritual. Below listed are the questions that you should ask yourself before setting up the MarTech budget:
1-Is the budget in the ballpark?
There is no easy and quick way to set up the budget. But there are fall back figures to refer to. Approximately 3.2% of the revenue can be dedicated to marketing if it is a mid enterprise. Staying in line with this figure should help.
2-How much are the competitors and peers spending on MarTech?
This is one of the healthiest way to estimate the budget that you can allot for MarTech. Measuring the budget in comparison with the benchmarks can help you deal with this issue. If competitors have doubled, you are probably in a very precarious state. You might have to do the same. But if your competitors aren’t focusing on the marketing that much, then you could also turn off the gas and sit quietly.
3-Do you have all your bases covered?
It is increasingly important for all marketers to align their budgets according to the account based initiatives. A Martech should address the below bare minimum categories:
- CRM marketing automation – examples of which could be Salesforce and Marketo
- Predictive Account Intelligence – Node could be an example
- Sales establishment – Yesware can be an example
- Marketing Performance Management – Bizible could be an example
These are extremely powerful categories which should be included in when thinking of MarTech.
4-What are the objectives of your marketing specifically
You would need to outline the budget out specifically for the martech functions that your organization will have. If you are planning to increase customer retention by at least 30%, you might need to double down on your sales enablement technology. Approximately 6242 MarTech platforms need to be consulted – which is a lot of programs. Mapping out these will help you get past the budget planning.
5-Devoting adequate resources to innovation?
CMO’s usually allocate 10% of the marketing budget down to innovation – which means discovering newer methods to reach the people. To stay atop all the competition this is an extremely important step. Best of the cutting edge tools need to be used by the marketers – and a proper budget would be needed for the same.
If one devotes proper time to answering these questions, one can come down to a conclusion and accordingly delegate a MarTech budget.